Conway's Game of Life

An implementation of Conway's cellular automata.

Examples Source Code

The code for all the examples can be obtained by either:

• pulling the docker image virgesmith/neworder:latest (more here), or
• installing neworder, downloading the source code archive from the neworder releases page and extracting the examples subdirectory.

Inputs

The only inputs are the grid size (2d) and the proportion of cells that are alive initially.

Implementation

This example uses the StateGrid class for efficient neighbour counting, requiring only a few lines of code to evolve a generation (see below). The initial alive cells are sampled randomly according to the proportion set. In each new generation, alive cells with less than 2 or more than 3 neighbours die; empty cells with 3 live neighbours come alive. Dead cells are coloured black, live cells are coloured according to how long they have been alive, from white (youngest) to brown (oldest).

  def step(self) -> None:
    n = self.domain.count_neighbours(lambda x: x > 0)

    deaths = np.logical_or(n < 2, n > 3)
    births = n == 3

    self.domain.state = self.domain.state * ~deaths + births

    self.__update_visualisation()

[file: examples/conway/conway.py]

Outputs

The sole output is an animation as shown above.