![]() ![]() The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation. ![]() Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent.Īt each step in time, the following rules apply: The game is played on a two-dimensional grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. You can discover more about John Conway’s Game of Life by checking out the large collection of information posted to the LifeWiki.In this article, you’ll learn how to make this beautiful and interesting animation using only Python, NumPy, and Matplotlib - nothing else: □īut how does the Game of Life work – and what’s behind the classical visualization anyways? The Game of LifeĬonway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. But the ‘game’ runs until the script is stopped and you’re never quite sure what you’ll see in the meantime. So what has been the end game? “Getting an exotic final pattern has been tough because the project would normally end with four pulsating rectangles,” Nick says. “Probably some web interface to select patterns and such.”Īs it stands, however, it’s a fun and mesmerising project exploring concepts of underpopulation and reproduction, and Nick has been happy to bring it back to life following John’s death. “I’ve refactored code I wrote 24 hours ago, so I would certainly restructure this whole project and add more features,” he affirms. But Nick also believes improvements can still be made. “My boss at work helped me out quite a bit in terms of connecting the technologies involved, such as Raspberry Pi, LED grids, Open Pixel library, and so on,” he says. Remote environments, monkey patching, GPIO – these were all foreign terms to me.” Controlling LEDs in Pythonĭelving into a real-world project, he says, provided a perfect way to familiarise himself with a new language. “Along with Python, I was also getting a very intense primer to web development and networking. “Designing it wasn’t a challenge, but there were plenty of challenges during development,” Nick says. Dead cells become alive when there are three live neighbours around them, otherwise they remain in a deceased state. If there are two or three neighbours present, then it will remain alive. If there is a live cell with either one or fewer live neighbours, or if there are more than four live neighbours, then that cell will die. This leads to very complex behaviour and patterns. This allows the LEDs to illuminate or switch off depending on the Game of Life’s set of rules.īut what are they? Well, the simple premise is that you have a set of cells, some alive and some dead, behaving in accordance to what is going on around them in the adjoining eight squares. The panels each use Adafruit’s FadeCandy, a NeoPixel driver that has built-in dithering and connects to a Raspberry Pi over USB. The project consists of a Raspberry Pi 2 computer, four 8×8 Adafruit LED grids, and the code. Once run, it needs no further interaction ![]() The game is governed by four defined laws It will run using any Raspberry Pi computer “In terms of architecture, I usually take a very object-oriented approach, but since Python was new to me at the time, I went down the functional route.” Game of Life Fast Facts “It started as a C# assignment for one of my engineering classes at university, so I had a lot of direction and criteria for what was expected,” Nick tells us. See the GitHub page for this project and follow Nick Kelly on Twitter. Nick is a software engineer living in San Francisco whose life changed when a friend introduced him to Python and web development. It has been produced by software engineer Nick Kelly, and it uses the same fixed set of rules that has served the simulation well over the years. One of the most intriguing – from our perspective at least – is a version run on a Raspberry Pi. John sadly passed away in April this year but his creation lives on, not only in memory but in different manifestations. ![]()
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