Programming Praxis

We studied one-dimensional cellular automata in a previous exercise. In today’s exercise, we will implement the famous two-dimensional cellular automaton by the British mathematician John Horton Conway, the Game of Life. Life was introduced by Martin Gardner in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American; I can remember coming home from the library and tracing a glider as it moved across my checkerboard.

The automaton exists on an infinite two-dimensional grid of cells, each either alive or dead. Each cell has a neighborhood of the eight cells horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjacent to it. A cell that is alive in one generation dies if it has less than two live neighbors or more than three live neighbors, otherwise is survives to the next generation; a cell that is dead becomes alive at the next generation if it has exactly three living neighbors. All births and deaths occur simultaneously from one generation to the next.

Mathematicians have shown that these simple rules evoke immense variety, and have built general-purpose computing structures from particular configurations of living cells. Forty-two years on, there are articles in scholarly journals, doctoral dissertations, and jillions of web sites that serve Life enthusiasts.

Your task is to write a program that computes and displays the history of a Life population. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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