Coding Example: Game of life (NumPy approach)

This lesson discusses the case study Game of life and explains its solution using NumPy approach.

We'll cover the following

NumPy Implementation

Starting from the Python version, the vectorization of the Game of Life requires two parts,

  • one responsible for counting the neighbors
  • one responsible for enforcing the rules

Neighbor-counting is relatively easy if we remember we took care of adding a null border around the arena. By considering partial views of the arena we can actually access neighbors quite intuitively as illustrated below for the one-dimensional case:

               ┏━━━┳━━━┳━━━┓───┬───┐
        Z[:-2] ┃ 0 ┃ 1 ┃ 1 ┃ 1 │ 0 │ (left neighbors)
               ┗━━━┻━━━┻━━━┛───┴───┘
                     ↓︎
           ┌───┏━━━┳━━━┳━━━┓───┐
   Z[1:-1] │ 0 ┃ 1 ┃ 1 ┃ 1 ┃ 0 │ (actual cells)
           └───┗━━━┻━━━┻━━━┛───┘
                     ↑
       ┌───┬───┏━━━┳━━━┳━━━┓
Z[+2:] │ 0 │ 1 ┃ 1 ┃ 1 ┃ 0 ┃ (right neighbors)
       └───┴───┗━━━┻━━━┻━━━┛

Going to the two dimensional case requires just a bit of arithmetic to make sure to consider all the eight neighbors.