conwaysGoL

The goal of conwaysGoL is to provide an easy-to-handle package to explore artificial life using the Conway’s Game of Life. The package allows to run simulations in a toroidal grid of any size for a desired number of generations. Users can save their simulations as a succession of frames and/or as GIFs. The package comes with a library of some common patterns that can be used freely during their simulations. This library can be enriched by the users and stored patterns can be used indefinitely across R sessions. Finally, users can easily convert Run-Length Encoding (RLE) files (from https://copy.sh/life/ for example) into binary (0,1) matrices compatible with the package functions.

Installation

You can install the development version of conwaysGoL from GitHub with:

install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_url(
  "https://github.com/LucasDLalande/conwaysGoL/archive/refs/heads/master.zip"
)

Usage and examples

Load the package:

library(conwaysGoL)

# runs a simple simulation on a randomly generated grid (living cells: 30%, 100x100, 20 generations)
gameoflife(nrow = 100,
ncol = 100,
generations = 20,
p = 0.3)

library(conwaysGoL)
# runs a simulation starting with a glider (initial position: (10,10)) and a Gosper glider gun (initial position: (60, 60)), rotated clockwise, in an empty grid
gameoflife(nrow = 100,
ncol = 100,
generations = 50,
pattern = c("glider", "gosper_gun"),
pos.row = c(10, 60),
pos.col = c(10, 60),
rotation = 90)

gameoflife(nrow = 100,
ncol = 100,
generations = 50,
pattern = c("glider", "gosper_gun"),
pos.row = c(10, 60),
pos.col = c(10, 60),
rotation = 90,
record = TRUE,
frames_prefix = "gosper_glider",
zero_padding = 3,
gif_name = "gosper_glider.gif",
output_path = "animations/")

# direct matrix
glider <- matrix(c(0,1,0,
0,0,1,
1,1,1),
nrow = 3,
byrow = TRUE)

plot_grid(glider)

# built-in matrix
plot_grid("pulsar")

# multiple patterns
glider <- matrix(c(0,1,0,
0,0,1,
1,1,1),
nrow = 3,
byrow = TRUE)

plot_grid(list("pulsar", glider))

list_patterns()
#>  [1] "beacon"         "beehive"        "blinker"        "block"         
#>  [5] "boat"           "glider"         "gosper_gun"     "HWSS"          
#>  [9] "loaf"           "LWSS"           "MWSS"           "pentadecathlon"
#> [13] "pulsar"         "random"         "toad"           "tub"

# temporary add a pattern built by the user
pattern <- matrix(
c(1,0,0,
1,1,1,
0,0,1),
nrow = 3,
byrow = TRUE)

add_pattern("my_own_pattern", pattern)

# permanently add a pattern extracted from a .rle file
cordership <- read_rle("patterns/cordership.rle")

add_pattern("cordership", cordership, permanent = TRUE)

License

This package is under the MIT License.

Citation

To cite conwaysGoL in your publications, please use: