conwaysGoL: An easy-to-handle Conway's Game of Life simulator for R

conwaysGoL 0.1.1 - 2026-01-18 Added None Changed None Fixed Metadata update for Zenodo release (no code changes) Deprecated None Description of 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) This is a basic example which shows how to run a simple simulation: # 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) Users can also run a simulation initiated with some of the built-in patterns: 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) By setting record = TRUE, users can save their simulation as GIF file in desired directory: 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/") Users can visualize binary (0,1) matrices and built-in patterns using the plot_grid() function: # direct matrix glider [5] "boat" "glider" "gosper_gun" "HWSS" #> [9] "loaf" "LWSS" "MWSS" "pentadecathlon" #> [13] "pulsar" "random" "toad" "tub" If users are interested in a specific structure of the Conway’s Game of Life, they can download a RLE file of the structure and convert it to a binary matrix compatible with the package using the read_rle() function. To do so, simply fill the function with the absolute or relative path to the downloaded .rle file. Finally, users can enrich the built-in pattern library with their own patterns (either written as binary matrices, or converted from .rle files): # temporary add a pattern built by the user pattern