Game of Life

For this activity, you will need to complete a program called life.c.

Make sure you have completed cellular before attempting this activity.

Download life.c, or copy it into your current directory on a CSE system by running

$ cp /web/cs1511/17s2/week05/files/life.c .

This program is a simple life simulator. It is an example of a 2-dimensional cellular automaton, similar to Conway’s Game of Life. In this simulation, the world is represented by two-dimensional array. Each element of the array is a single cell which can contain up to 1 creature. If it contains a creature, we call it ALIVE. If it contains no creatures, we call it DEAD.

The simulation will advance between generations. Every time it moves to a new generation each cell may

• become ALIVE,
• become DEAD,
• stay ALIVE, or
• stay DEAD.

Your task is to complete the function nextGeneration, which takes in an array of the current generation and the next generation, and sets all of the values of the cells in the next generation. Currently, this function makes every generation the same.

This version of the simulator is more complex than cellular. In this version, each cell can have neighbours in two directions, left and right (which are on the same array), and above and below (which are on the previous and next arrays). This version also has diagonal neighbours.

The rules for what happens on each generation are:

• If a cell in the current generation is DEAD, then in the next generation
  • it becomes ALIVE if it has exactly three ALIVE neighbours, otherwise
  • it remains DEAD.
• If a cell in the current generation is ALIVE, then in the next generation
  • it remains ALIVE if it has two or three ALIVE neighbours, otherwise
  • it becomes DEAD.
• The neighbours of a cell are the cells that are
  • next to it, in its own array,
  • above it, in the previous array,
  • below it, in the next array,
  • diagonal to it, next to the cells in the previous or next array.
• The edges, before the first row and column and after the last row and column, are considered DEAD

There are no tests for this activity, so feel free to have some fun. Try and see what happens to the output if you change the rules.

To run Styl-o-matic:

$ 1511 stylomatic life.c
Looks good!

You’ll get advice if you need to make changes to your code.

Submit your work with the give command, like so:

$ give cs1511 wk05_life

Or, if you are working from home, upload the relevant file(s) to the wk05_life activity on Give Online.