Setting age in Parellelised game of life

Question

I am a university student and my teacher is making us to create a prey/predator simulation with OMP for. I had covid during his lectures and he didn’t upload them, so sorry I am being stupid here

Onto the question,

I have implemented Age as the absolute value for the cell as he asked but I simply cannot think of a way to make each cell have their own individual age after breeding. Here is my code:

#pragma omp parallel num_threads(4)            
                {
#pragma omp for schedule(dynamic, 1)                                
                    for (int i = 1; i <= Y; i++)             //for loop Y
                    {           
                        for (int j = 1; j <= X; j++)         //for loop X
                        {
                            int Left = i - 1;
                            int Right = i + 1;
                            int Bottom = j - 1;
                            int Top = j + 1;

                            int Fish = 0;
                            int Shark = 0;                                   
                            
                            int FishAge = 1;
                            int SharkAge = -1;

                            int NewFishAge = 1; 

                            //COUNTING SHARK AND FISH
                            //SHARK OR FISH - TOP LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[Left][Top] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Left][Top] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH - TOP 
                            if (oldOcean[i][Top] > 0)
                            { 
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[i][Top] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH - TOP RIGHT
                            if (oldOcean[Right][Top] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Right][Top] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH -  LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[Left][j] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;                                
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Left][j] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH -  LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[Right][j] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Right][j] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH -  LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[Left][Bottom] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Left][Bottom] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH -  LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[i][Bottom] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[i][Bottom] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            }

                            //SHARK OR FISH -  LEFT
                            if (oldOcean[Right][Bottom] > 0)
                            {
                                Fish++;
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[Right][Bottom] < 0)
                            {
                                Shark--;
                            } 
                             //AGE
                            if (oldOcean[i][j] > 0)
                            {                            
                                oldOcean[i][j]++;
                                FishAge = oldOcean[i][j] - 2;                              
                            }
                            else if (oldOcean[i][j] < 0)
                            {
                                oldOcean[i][j]--;
                                SharkAge = oldOcean[i][j] * -1;
                                //std::cout << "AGE" << SharkAge;
                            }


                            //EMPTY CELLS & BREEDING
                            if (oldOcean[i][j] == 0)
                            {                                         
                                //newOcean[i][j] = 0;
                                if (Fish >= 4 && Shark > -4 && FishAge >= 2)
                                {                                   
                                    
                                    newOcean[i][j]=1;                                    
                                }   
                                else if (Shark <= -4  && Fish < 4 && SharkAge >= 3)
                                {
                                    newOcean[i][j] = -1;
                                }     
                                else
                                {
                                    newOcean[i][j] = 0;
                                }
                                newOcean[i][j] = oldOcean[i][j];
                            }

                            //FISH CELLS
                            if (oldOcean[i][j] > 0)
                            {                                                          
                              if (FishAge < 10)
                              {
                                  FishAge++;                                  
                              }
                              //std::cout <<FishAge;
                              if (FishAge >= 10 || Shark <= -5)
                              {                                
                                  oldOcean[i][j] = 0;                  //kill fish      
                                  FishAge = 0; 
                              }    

                              if (Fish >= 8)
                              {                                  
                                  newOcean[i][j] = 0;                  //overpopulation
                              }       

                              newOcean[i][j] = oldOcean[i][j];
                            }

                            //SHARK CELLS 
                            if (oldOcean[i][j] < 0)
                            {                                    
                                if (SharkAge <= 20 )
                                {
                                    SharkAge++;
                                }                                
                                if ((Shark <= -6 && Fish == 0) || SharkAge >= 20)             
                                {
                                    oldOcean[i][j] = 0;                   // dies of Starvation       
                                    SharkAge = 0;
                                                                       
                                }                                
                                if (ChanceofDeath <= rand() / ((int)RAND_MAX + 32))
                                {
                                    newOcean[i][j] = 0;                  // Random Death ???
                                }      
                                newOcean[i][j] = oldOcean[i][j];
                                
                            }                               
                            
                        }
                    }                    
                }

I am a very amateur coder, so any improvement feel free to tell me too please, I love to learn

my code for the age is under the "//AGE" section

Sorry again, and thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Even without considering age, you must check every cell in every generation. And it should be easy to maintain an age per cell during these checks:

• If a dead cell has three neighbors, it gets born (cell.age = 0).
• If an alive cell has two or three neighbors, it survives (cell.age++).
• If an alive cell has less than two or more than three neighbors, it dies. (No cell.age any more.)