The Game of Life Write a complete C program that implements Conway\'s Game of Li

Question

The Game of Life
Write a complete C program that implements Conway's Game of Life.

The rules for the Game of Life are simple. The universe consists of a two-dimensional matrix of cells with each cell being alive or dead. For each generation every cell determines its next phase of life as follows:

If the cell is alive:

it dies if it has 0, 1, 4 or more living neighbours (starvation), or

it lives if it has 2 or 3 living neighbours (balance).

If the cell is dead:

it springs to life if it has exactly 3 neighbours (procreation).

A cycle occurs as soon as the state of the universe of the latest generation is the same as a previous generation. You should be able to see that once this occurs the Game of Life will repeat the intermediate generations forever.

Implementation Requirements
All of the following conditions must be met by your solution.

Your program must read the initial state from standard input (redirecting files on the command line is the way to go!).You will be expected to adequately test your program All input will conform to the following format:

The input will consist of starting universes for multiple games. Play each game completely, in the order they appear in the file.

The first line of the game starts with an asterisk and contains the game title.

The second line of the game contains two numbers, separated by a space, which indicate the number of rows and columns for the 2-D matrix.

Then there is one line for each row in the matrix:

A blank character represents a dead cell.

An 'X' represents an alive cell.

The next game starts on the next line, until EOF.

There are no errors in the input file format.

For each game, your program will first print the game title as read from the file. Print the starting universe as read in. Then, after each generation is calculated your program will print the current state of the universe. All printing goes to standard output, and each universe must be preceded by a label indicating the generation number (where the initial state is generation 0). You must include a border, use '.' for dead cells and '*' for alive cells.

Each game will run for 250 generations or until a cycle is detected, whichever comes first. If the game ends because of a cycle, print the numbers of the two generations that were duplicated.

Printing all generations is great for debugging purposes (and should prove mesmerizing). But the release version of your program, when compiled with -DNDEBUG, should only print the initial universe and the last 10 (or less) generations. The sample output above is produced by a release version.

Hints
The following should help point you in the right direction:

Store the universe in a two-dimensional array, but be careful that your program avoids subscripting your array "out of bounds". Not checking for array boundaries may lead to your program crashing, or worse, giving the wrong results.

You will need to store all previous generations in order to identify a cycle. To do this, consider using a struct to represent a generation. Then, you can employ an array of objects to track your universe's history.

You may assume file input lines are at most 80 characters, and a universe is at most 60x60 cells.

Here is a sample input file to use for testing.

Explanation / Answer

#include #include #include #include #include using namespace std; //Copies one array to another. void copy(int array1[52][102], int array2[52][102]) { for(int j = 0; j < 52; j++) { for(int i = 0; i < 102; i++) array2[j][i] = array1[j][i]; } } //The life function is the most important function in the program. //It counts the number of cells surrounding the center cell, and //determines whether it lives, dies, or stays the same. void life(int array[52][102], char choice) { //Copies the main array to a temp array so changes can be entered into a grid //without effecting the other cells and the calculations being performed on them. int temp[52][102]; copy(array, temp); for(int j = 1; j < 51; j++) { for(int i = 1; i < 101; i++) { if(choice == 'm') { //The Moore neighborhood checks all 8 cells surrounding the current cell in the array. int count = 0; count = array[j-1][i] + array[j-1][i-1] + array[j][i-1] + array[j+1][i-1] + array[j+1][i] + array[j+1][i+1] + array[j][i+1] + array[j-1][i+1]; //The cell dies. if(count < 2 || count > 3) temp[j][i] = 0; //The cell stays the same. if(count == 2) temp[j][i] = array[j][i]; //The cell either stays alive, or is "born". if(count == 3) temp[j][i] = 1; } else if(choice == 'v') { //The Von Neumann neighborhood checks only the 4 surrounding cells in the array, //(N, S, E, and W). int count = 0; count = array[j-1][i] + array[j][i-1] + array[j+1][i] + array[j][i+1]; //The cell dies. if(count < 2 || count > 3) temp[j][i] = 0; //The cell stays the same. if(count == 2) temp[j][i] = array[j][i]; //The cell either stays alive, or is "born". if(count == 3) temp[j][i] = 1; } } } //Copies the completed temp array back to the main array. copy(temp, array); } //Checks to see if two arrays are exactly the same. //This is used to end the simulation early, if it //becomes stable before the 100th generation. This //occurs fairly often in the Von Neumann neighborhood, //but almost never in the Moore neighborhood. bool compare(int array1[52][102], int array2[52][102]) { int count = 0; for(int j = 0; j < 52; j++) { for(int i = 0; i < 102; i++) { if(array1[j][i]==array2[j][i]) count++; } } //Since the count gets incremented every time the cells are exactly the same, //an easy way to check if the two arrays are equal is to compare the count to //the dimensions of the array multiplied together. if(count == 52*102) return true; else return false; } //This function prints the 50 x 100 part of the array, since that's the only //portion of the array that we're really interested in. A live cell is marked //by a '*', and a dead or vacant cell by a ' '. void print(int array[52][102]) { for(int j = 1; j < 51; j++) { for(int i = 1; i < 101; i++) { if(array[j][i] == 1) cout

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