Chapter 9

Game of Life

Conway’s Game of Life makes use of sparse matrices.

The “Game of Life” was invented by John Horton Conway, a British-born

mathematician who is now a professor at Princeton. The game made its public debut
in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, in the “Mathematical Games”
column written by Martin Gardner. At the time, Gardner wrote
This month we consider Conway’s latest brainchild, a fantastic solitaire
pastime he calls “life”. Because of its analogies with the rise, fall and
alternations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class
of what are called “simulation games” – games that resemble real-life
processes. To play life you must have a fairly large checkerboard and a
plentiful supply of flat counters of two colors.
Of course, today we can run the simulations on our computers.
The universe is an infinite, two-dimensional rectangular grid. The population
is a collection of grid cells that are marked as alive. The population evolves at
discrete time steps known as generations. At each step, the fate of each cell is
determined by the vitality of its eight nearest neighbors and this rule:
• A live cell with two live neighbors, or any cell with three live neigbhors, is
alive at the next step.
The fascination of Conway’s Game of Life is that this deceptively simple rule leads
to an incredible variety of patterns, puzzles, and unsolved mathematical problems
– just like real life.
If the initial population consists of only one or two live cells, it expires in one
step. If the initial population consists of three live cells then, because of rotational

Copyright ° c 2008 Cleve Moler

Matlab° R
is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.TM
April 6, 2008

1
2 Chapter 9. Game of Life

Figure 9.1. A pre-block and a block.

and reflexive symmetries, there are only two different possibilities – the population
is either L-shaped or I-shaped. The left half of figure 9.1 shows three live cells in
an L-shape. All three cells have two live neighbors, so they survive. The dead cell
that they all touch has three live neighbors, so it springs to life. None of the other
dead cells have enough live neighbors to come to life. So the result, after one step,
is the population shown in the right half of figure 9.1. This four-cell population,
known as the block, is stationary. Each of the live cells has three live neighbors and
so lives on. None of the other cells can come to life.

Figure 9.2. A blinker blinking.

The other three-cell initial population is I-shaped. The two possible orien-
tations are shown in each half of figure 9.2. At each step, two end cells die, the
middle cell stays alive, and two new cells are born to give the orientation shown
in the other half of the figure. If nothing disturbs it, this blinker keeps blinking
forever. It repeats itself in two steps; this is known as its period.
One possible four-cell initial population is the block. Discovering the fate of
the other four-cell initial populations is left to an exercise.
The beginning of the evolution of the most important five-cell initial popula-
tion, known as the glider, is shown in figure 9.3. At each step two cells die and two
new ones are born. After four steps the original population reappears, but it has
moved diagonally down and across the grid. It continues to move in this direction
forever, eventually disappearing out of our field of view, but continuing to exist in
the infinite universe.
The fascination of the Game of Life cannot be captured in these static fig-
ures. Computer graphics lets you watch the dynamic development. We will show
just more one static snapshot of the evolution of an important larger population.
Figure 9.4 is the glider gun developed by Bill Gosper at MIT in 1970. The portion
of the population between the two static blocks oscillates back and forth. Every 30
steps, a glider emerges. The result is an infinite stream of gliders that fly out of the
field of view.
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Figure 9.3. A glider gliding.

Figure 9.4. Gosper’s glider gun.

Matlab is a convenient environment for implementing the Game of Life. The

universe is a matrix. The population is the set of nonzero elements in the matrix.
The universe is infinite, but the population is finite and usually fairly small. So
we can store the population in a finite matrix, most of whose elements are zero,
and increase the size of the matrix if necessary when the population expands. This
is the ideal setup for a sparse matrix. Conventional storage of an n-by-n matrix
requires n2 memory. But sparse storage of a matrix X requires just three vectors,
one integer and one floating point vector of length nnz(X) – the number of nonzero
4 Chapter 9. Game of Life

elements in X – and one integer vector of length n, not n2 , to represent the start
of each column. For example, the snapshot of the Gosper glider gun in figure 9.4
is represented by an 85-by-85 matrix with 68 nonzero entries. Conventional full
matrix storage would require 852 = 7225 elements. Sparse matrix storage requires
only 2 · 65 + 85 = 221 elements. This advantage of sparse over full storage increases
as more gliders are created, the population expands, and n increases.
The exm toolbox includes a program called lifex. (Matlab itself has a
simpler demo program called life.) The initial population is represented by a
matrix of 0’s and 1’s. For example,

G = [1 1 1; 1 0 0; 0 1 0]

produces a single glider

G =
1 1 1
1 0 0
0 1 0

The universe is represented by a sparse n-by-n matrix X that is initially all zero.
We might start with n = 23 so there will be a 10 cell wide border around a 3-by-3
center. The statements

n = 23;
X = sparse(n,n)

produce

X =
All zero sparse: 23-by-23

The initial population is injected in the center of the universe. with the statement

X(11:13,11:13) = G

This produces a list of the nonzero elements

X =
(11,11) 1
(12,11) 1
(11,12) 1
(13,12) 1
(11,13) 1

We are now ready to take the first step in the simulation. Whether cells stay alive,
die, or generate new cells depends upon how many of their eight neighbors are alive.
The statements

p = [n 1:n-1];
q = [2:n 1];
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generate index vectors that increase or decrease the centered index by one, thereby
accessing neighbors to the left, right, up, down, and so on. The statement
Y = X(:,p) + X(:,q) + X(p,:) + X(q,:) + ...
X(p,p) + X(q,q) + X(p,q) + X(q,p)
produces a sparse matrix with integer elements between 0 and 8 that counts how
many of the eight neighbors of each interior cell are alive. In our example with the
first step of the glider, the cells with nonzero counts are
Y =
(9,9) 1 (10,9) 2
(11,9) 2 (12,9) 1
(9,10) 2 (10,10) 2
(11,10) 3 (12,10) 2
(13,10) 1 (9,11) 3
(10,11) 3 (11,11) 5
(12,11) 1 (13,11) 1
(9,12) 2 (10,12) 1
(11,12) 3 (12,12) 1
(13,12) 1 (9,13) 1
(10,13) 1 (11,13) 1
The basic rule of Life is
A live cell with two live neighbors, or any cell with three live neigbhors,
is alive at the next step.
This is implemented with the single Matlab statement
X = (X & (Y == 2)) | (Y == 3)
The two characters == mean “is equal to”. The ’&’ character means “and”. The
’|’ means “or”. These operations are done for all the cells in the interior of the
universe. In this example, there are four cells where Y is equal to 3, so they survive
or come alive. There is one cell where X is equal to 1 and Y is equal to 2, so it
survives. The result is
X =
(11,11) 1
(12,11) 1
(10,12) 1
(11,12) 1
(12,13) 1
Our glider has taken its first step.
One way to use lifex is to provide your own initial population, as either a
full or a sparse matrix. For example, you create your own fleet of gliders fleet with
G = [1 1 1; 1 0 0; 0 1 0]
6 Chapter 9. Game of Life

S = sparse(15,15);
for i = 0:6:12
for j = 0:6:12
S(i+(1:3),j+(1:3)) = G;
end
end
lifex(S)
The Web page
http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm
is the home of the “Life Lexicon”, maintained by Stephen Silver. Among thousands
of the facts of Life, this 160-page document lists nearly 450 different initial popu-
lations, together with their history and important properties. We have included a
text copy of the Lexicon with the exm toolbox in the file
exm/lexicon.txt
Lifex can read initial populations from the Lexicon. Calling lifex with no
arguments,
lifex
picks a random initial population from the Lexicon. Either
lifex(’xyz’)
or
lifex xyz
will look for a population whose name begins with xyz. For example, the statements
lifex pre-block
lifex block
lifex blinker
lifex glider
start with the simple populations that we have used in this introduction. The
statement
lifex Gosper
provides Gosper’s glider gun.
By default, the initial population is surrounded by a strip of 20 dead border
cells to provide a viewing window. You can change this to use b border cells with
lifex(’xyz’,b)
If the population expands during the simulation and cells travel beyond this viewing
window, they continue to live and participate even though they cannot be seen.
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Further Reading
The Wikipedia article is a good introduction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Game_of_Life

Another good introduction is available from Math.com, although there are annoying
popups and ads.

http://www.math.com/students/wonders/life/life.html

If you find yourself at all interested in the Game of Life, take a good look at the
Lexicon, either by reading our text version or by visiting the Web page.

http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm

Exercises

9.1 Four-cell initial populations. What are all of the possible four-cell initial popu-
lations, and what are their fates? You can generate one of the four-cell populations
with

L = [1 1 1; 1 0 0];
lifex(L,4)

9.2 Lexicon. Describe the behavior of each of these populations from the Lexicon.
If any is periodic, what is its period?

ants
B-52
blinker puffer
diehard
Canada goose
gliders by the dozen
Kok’s galaxy
rabbits
R2D2
spacefiller
wasp
washerwoman

9.3 Glider collisions. What happens when:

A glider collides head-on with a block?

A glider side-swipes a block?
Two gliders collide head-on?
8 Chapter 9. Game of Life

Two gliders clip each others wings?

Four gliders simultaneously leave the corners of a square and head to-
wards its center?

See also: lifex(’4-8-12’).

9.4 Factory. How many steps does it take the factory to make one glider?

9.5 R-pentomino. Of all the possible five-cell initial populations, the only one that
requires a computer to determine its ultimate behavior is the one that Conway
dubbed the R-pentomino. It is shown in figure 9.5 and can be generated by

R = [0 1 1; 1 1 0; 0 1 0]

Figure 9.5. The R-pentomino.

As the simulation proceeds, the population throws off a few gliders, but otherwise
remains bounded. If you make b large enough, the statement

lifex(R,b)

shows all of the bounded behavior. How large does this b have to be? What is
the maximum population during the evolution? How many gliders are produced?
How many steps does it take for the population to stabilize? How many blinkers
are present in the stabilized population? What is size of the stabilized population?

9.6 Exection time. Display actual computer execution time by adding tic and toc
to lifex.m. Place the single statement

tic

before the start of the inner loop. Change the call of caption to

caption(t,nnz(X),toc)

Make the appropriate modifications in the caption subfunction at the end of

lifex.m. Demonstrate your modified program on a few interesting examples.

9.7 The Ark. Run

lifex(’ark’,128)
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for a few minutes. About how much time does it take on your computer to do one
step? According to the Lexicon, the ark requires 736692 steps to stabilize. About
how much time will it take on your computer for the ark to stabilize?

9.8 Houses. Check out

lifex(houses)

9.9 Checkerboards. This code generates an n-by-n checkboard of 0’s and 1’s.
[I,J] = meshgrid(1:n);
C = (mod(I+J,2)==0);
What are the stabilization times and final populations for n-by-n checkboard initial
populations with 3 <= n <= 30?