Game of life is a cellular automata devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. It is not a game in the conventional sense, there are no winners and losers. The game progresses by some simple rules and the state of the cells at the end of the game is determined by the initial state of the cells.
The game takes place in a two dimensional grid of cells. Each cell can be in one of the two states, alive or dead (1
or 0
). The state of the cell in the next generation is determined by the states of the current neighbour cells. The rules are as follows:
where, is the function that determines the state of the cell in the next generation, is the state of the cell in the current generation and is the number of live neighbours. The symbol is the logical AND operator and is the inclusive range from to .
The above example shows the evolution of a cell in the next generation. For now just focus on the cell marked with []
. In the equation , the live cell has live neighbours, so it dies by overpopulation. In the equation , the dead cell has exactly live neighbours, so it becomes alive by reproduction.
In the basic implementation, we use a two dimensional array of bool
to represent the state of the cells. The number of live neighbours is calculated for each cell and the state of the cell is updated accordingly.
Declaring the struct for the game:
Note: Here, we don't have to explicitly initialize the
World
andNextWorld
as pointers. In Go, slides are passed by reference.
The World
and NextWorld
are one dimensional arrays of bool
to represent the current and next state of the cells. These one dimensional arrays are used to represent the two dimensional grid of cells by mapping the two dimensional indices to one dimensional indices. The Rows
and Cols
are the number of rows and columns in the world.
The alive neighbours are calculated for each cell using the following function:
The aliveNeighbours
function takes the row and column of the cell as input and returns the number of alive neighbours. The function iterates over the cells in the neighbourhood of the cell and counts the number of alive cells. The i
and j
are wrapped around the world to handle the edge cases.
The NextWorld
is updated using the following function:
The updateWorld
function iterates over the cells in the world and updates the NextWorld
based on the number of alive neighbours. The NextWorld
is then copied to the World
to update the state of the world.
Now, if we look at the rules of the game, we can see that the state of the cell is either alive or dead, which is a single bit data. A cell can have a maximum of 8 neighbours, a 4 bit data. So, to represent the cell state and the number of alive neighbours, a total of 5 bits () are required. But, there is no 5 bit data type (specially in Go). So, we use a byte (8-bit) data type to represent the state of the cell and the number of live neighbours.
The Game
struct is updated to use a one dimensional array of byte
to represent the world:
To store the state of cell we use the following bit operations for the LSB
:
To store the number of alive neighbours, we iterate over the neighbours and set the bits accordingly:
As the first bit from the LSB
is used to represent the state of the cell, the number of alive neighbours are stored from the second bit from the LSB
. By adding or subtracting 0x02
from the cell, we can change the number of alive neighbours.
The next state of the cell is calculated using the following function:
We make a copy of the original world World
to avoid updating the world while calculating the next generation. The dead cells are skipped to avoid unnecessary calculations.
The code is already pretty fast compared to the basic implementation. But, we can make it even faster by using concurrency1. We can use goroutines to calculate the number of alive neighbours for each cell in parallel. For the concurrency, we pass row(s) to the goroutines and perform the calculations for the next generation. Because, the number of rows can be very large to pass to individual goroutines, we pass a set of rows to each goroutine. The number of goroutines is set to the , where is the number of cores in the CPU. To avoid jumping to the next generation with incomplete calculations, we use a wait group to wait for all the goroutines to finish their calculations.
But, this way Race Condition occurs, caused by multiple Goroutines trying to access the same memory location at the same time. This causes random behavior of the cells. To avoid this, we use a mutex lock to lock the memory location while accessing it.
The basic implementation is pretty slow. The optimization with a byte to represent the state of the cell and the number of alive neighbours is fast. The optimization with concurrency is even faster. The following table shows the speed of the different implementations based on the time taken to calculate the next generation for a world of size 512x512, 1024x1024 and 2048x2048.
Implementation | 512x512 | 1024x1024 | 2048x2048 |
---|---|---|---|
Basic | x1 | x1 | x1 |
Byte Data Type | x85 | x50 | x79 |
Byte Data Type with Concurrency | x179 | x265 | x320 |
The GitHub repository for the code can be found in tasnimzotder/artificial-life: A simple artificial life simulator
Concurrency is the ability of a program to break down into smaller parts that can be executed independently and simultaneously. Concurrency is not equivalent to parallelism. ↩