I’m working on the Conway’s game of life program. I have the first two generations of cells printed out, but I can not get anymore printed. So I decided to use recursion so multiple batches of cells can be printed. My NewCells method creates the second generation. I thought that If I were to repeat said method by returning NewCells(c) instead of c, It would print out different results, but it prints out the same batch of cells over and over again.
public class Life {
public static boolean[][] NewCells(boolean[][] c)
{
int N = 5;
int o=0;
int p=0;
int livecnt = 0; //keeps track of the alive cells surrounding cell
int store = 0; //amount of surrounding cells for each individual cell
int livestore[] = new int[N*N];
System.out.println("Next Generation");
// Checks for the amount of "*" surrounding (o,p)
for (o=0; o < N; o++)
{
for (p=0; p<N; p++)
{
for (int k=(o-1); k <= o+1; k++)
{
for (int l =(p-1); l <=p+1; l++)
{
if ( k >= 0 && k < N && l >= 0 && l < N) //for the border indexes.
{
if (!(k== o && l==p)) //so livecnt won't include the index being checked.
{
if (c[k][l] == true)
{
livecnt++;
}
}
}
}
}
livestore[store]= livecnt;
livecnt = 0;
store++;
}
}
//Prints the next batch of cells
int counter= 0;
for (int i2 = 0; i2 <N; i2++)
{
for (int j2 = 0; j2 < N; j2++)
{
if (c[i2][j2] == false)
{
if (livestore[counter] ==3)
{
c[i2][j2]=true;
System.out.print("* ");
}
else
System.out.print("- ");
}
else if (c[i2][j2] == true)
{
if (livestore[counter] ==1)
{
c[i2][j2]= false;
System.out.print("- ");
}
else if (livestore[counter] >3)
{
c[i2][j2]= false;
System.out.print("- ");
}
else
System.out.print("* ");
}
counter++;
}
System.out.println();
}
return NewCell(c);
}
/*************************************************************************************************************************************************/
public static void main(String[] args)
{
int N = 5;
boolean[][] b = new boolean[N][N];
double cellmaker = Math.random();
int i = 0;
int j = 0;
int o=0;
int p=0;
int livecnt = 0; //keeps track of the alive cells surrounding cell
int store = 0; //amount of surrounding cells for each individual cell
int livestore[] = new int[N*N];
System.out.println("First Generation:");
// Makes the first batch of cells
for ( i = 0; i < N ; i++)
{
for ( j = 0; j< N; j++)
{
cellmaker = Math.random();
if (cellmaker > 0.5) // * = alive; - = dead
{
b[i][j]=true;
System.out.print( "* ");
}
if (cellmaker < 0.5)
{ b[i][j] = false;
System.out.print("- ");
}
}
System.out.println();
}
boolean[][] newcells = new boolean[N][N];
newcells = NewCells(b);
}
}
I do not think recursion is a good idea for this application. It leads to a StackOverflowError because each generation pushes another call stack frame. Recursion, as this program uses it, has no advantage over iteration.
Instead, put the main method call to NewCells in a loop. That way, you can run as many iterations as you like, regardless of stack size.