[Tutor] The Game of Life question

[Kent Johnson]

You need to include the line
import random

at the beginning of your program. This gives you access to the contents of the 'random' module such 
as random.choice().

This chapter of the tutorial talks about modules:
http://docs.python.org/tut/node8.html

Kent

Kooser, Ara S wrote:
>    This is most likely a silly question and me not understanding python
> enough. I am a mentor for some high school kids participating in a
> supercomputing challenge. My background in programming is F77 (yeah
> laugh it up) and I want the kids to learn python and use it for the
> challenge. 
>    They picked a project to model the flow of smallpox in a city and
> surroundings areas. So I saw the game of life and thought maybe they
> could modify it for use as a smallpox model. My question is when I run
> this code as is and execute the command to generate a world, I get the
> following error:
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<pyshell#0>", line 1, in -toplevel-
>     print_world(make_random_world(10, 10))
>   File "C:\Python23\gameoflife.py", line 12, in make_random_world
>     world[i, j] = random.choice([LIVE, DEAD])
> NameError: global name 'random' is not defined
> 
> 
> Does "random" need to be defined after LIVE,DEAD or am I just missing
> something. I was trying to run this on my work computer which is a winXP
> machine running python 2.4.
> 
> Thanks,
> Ara
> 
> 
> 
> This is the part of the game of life program I am trying to get to run
> 
> LIVE, DEAD = '*', '.'
> 
> def make_random_world(M, N):
>     """Constructs a new random game world of size MxN."""
>     world = {}
>     for j in range(N):
>         for i in range(M):
>             world[i, j] = random.choice([LIVE, DEAD])
>     world['dimensions'] = (M, N)
>     return world
> 
> def print_world(world):
>     """Prints out a string representation of a world."""
>     M, N = world['dimensions']
>     for j in range(N):
>         for i in range(M):
>             print world[i, j],
>         print
> 
> 
>>>>print_world(make_random_world(10, 10))
> 
> 
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