Need help displaying the matrix in Conway's game of life

So I cannot find a good way to display and then update the checkerboard during consecutive iterations of the game of life.

I am currently using mat2gray() to convert the matrix to grayscale, and then imshow() to display the matrix. But doing it this way slows down my laptop quite a lot, and I have to close and reopen the image with each iteration.

Is there a way to keep the existing matrix open (perhaps not as an image file) and update it live?

Many thanks,

Joe

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

"Is there a way to keep the existing matrix open (perhaps not as an image file) and update it live?"

Create the image as a matrix, and display it using image. Make sure that you obtain the image handle:

imh = image(M);

then simply update the image handle's data whenever you want:

set(imh,'CData',M)

Read more in the MATLAB documentation:

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/matlab.graphics.primitive.image-properties.html

[Guillaume]

Assuming the matrix is just 0s and 1s, I recommend using

imh = image(M, 'CdataMapping', 'scaled')
colormap gray

[Joe Sheppard]

I will try this, as Stephens suggestions just gave a uniform purple square.

Many thanks to both of you though, for getting back to me so quickly :)

I do appreciate it!