MATLAB: Game of Life rules using switch statement.

game of lifeswitch

Hi could someone please help me write out the game of life rules using switch statement. i know how to do it using if else if (which is all i can find on internet) but there aren't any that use switch. is it possible to use switch? are there any advantages?
say the number of neighbours is called counts. what would I call the new count (i.e how would i update the world?)
would it be:
switch n
case 1 counts= 1, newcount=0??
obviously not thats way to easy

Best Answer

Josh - from Game of Life, there are four rules that need to be applied given the state of the cell, three of which are appropriate if the cell is live and one for when the cell is dead. So you have two "objects" to consider - the state of the cell and the rule to apply. Typically, I would use a switch statement only if I had one object (or its state) to be concerned with. In this case, you could use a switch statement on the state of the cell and then, if needed, use a switch statement on the neighbours. Something like

 switch isCellAlive
     case true
         switch numNeighbours
             case {0,1}
                 % live cell has fewer than two neighbours and so dies
             case {2,3}
                 % live cell has 2 0r 3 neighbours and so lives
             otherwise
                 % live cell dies due to over-population
         end
     case false
         if numNeighbours == 3
            % dead cell becomes live
         end
 end

Note that isCellAlive indicates the state of the cell (live or dead, true or false) and that numNeighbours indicates the number of live cells or neighbours.

So are there any advantages to using a switch in the above? I'm not sure. It does work because we only have a small set of integers that are appropriate for each of the cases (0 or 1, or 2 or 3). If you had larger ranges (say all positive integers between 1 and 25) then an if condition would be easier to use than doing case {1,2,3,4,etc.}. I think that the above code is as readable this way or if we were to use an if/elseif block.

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