Edit: Apparently this is in the PDL Documentation, as an example. Whoops! Still, it was a good learning exercise :)

Rather than a ported numpy tutorial, this is a self developed implementation of Conways Game of Life written in Perl/PDL. Hopefully people find this interesting as I feel it shows how concise PDL code can be.

The code is fairly straightforward. There is a single function conway() which accepts a single argument of the game arena. This is a two dimensional PDL matrix. Alive cells are represented by a one, dead ones by zero. The conway() function sums the value of each cell along with value of its nine neighbours into a temporary variable $tmp. It then applies the rules of the game, which are:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by under population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

This is implemented as an elementwise or and an elementwise and.

The main loop of the game is in the body of the code and simply displays the generation and the game arena and awaits input

The game arena is initialised with a 'glider', but feel free to experiment. As PDL wraps around by default, the surface is that of a torus.

Enter a blank line for the next generation, anything else to exit

Enjoy

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.016;

use PDL;

sub conway {
    my $pdl = shift;
    die "Not 2D piddle" unless $pdl->ndims == 2;

    # Add up all values:
    my $tmp = $pdl +                                       # original
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(-1)->transpose +             # north
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(-1)->transpose->rotate(-1) + # northeast
      $pdl->rotate(-1) +                                   # east
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(1)->transpose->rotate(-1) +  # southeast
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(1)->transpose +              # south
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(1)->transpose->rotate(1) +   # southwest
      $pdl->rotate(1) +                                    # west
      $pdl->transpose->rotate(-1)->transpose->rotate(1);   # northwest

    # Cell is alive if it's either:
    return ( $tmp == 4 & $pdl == 1 ) |    # Alive +3 neighbors
      $tmp == 3;    #  Alive +2 neighbors or dead +3 neighbors
}

my $arena = pdl(byte,
    [
        [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
        [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 ],
    ]
);

my $gen = 0;
while (1) {
    print "Generation: $gen (press enter for next)\n";
    print $arena;
    $arena = conway($arena);
    $gen++;
    exit if <STDIN> ne "\n";
}
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