A Short Game of Life

Posted bySteve Eddins,February 28, 2022

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           I have written
           here
           , as well as in
           Digital Image Processing Using MATLAB
           , about using image processing operations to implement
           Conway's Game of Life
           . MATLAB creator Cleve Moler has written about the Game of Life several times (
           03-Sep-2012
           ,
           10-Sep-2012
           ,
           17-Sep-2012
           , and
           08-Nov-2018
           ) on Cleve's Corner.
          

           Recently, I saw a particularly concise implementation of the game. My MathWorks colleague, Christopher Creutzig, recently posted the following code snippet on a MathWorks company forum. These seven lines of code initialize a 750x750 game board, run the board through 500 generations, and save the result as an animated GIF file.
          

            im = rand(750,750)>0.8;
           

            fork=1:500
           

            t = conv2(im(:,:,k),[2,2,2;2,1,2;2,2,2],'same');
           

            im(:,:,1,k+1) = (t > 4) & (t < 8);
           

end

            imwrite(~im,'life.gif','DelayTime',0,'LoopCount',1)
           

           Matt McDonnell, a former MathWorks consultant, explored several short implementation techniques in his
           19-Jan-2010 post
           on Loren's Art of MATLAB. More good ideas can be found in the reader comments on that post.
          