Need help with Game of life

%I have school project which requires to programme Game of life. What im looking for is tips and trick to how to imporve my current code, im quite new to matlab and this is only the begining of my project but im getting stuck at some place and would really appriciate some help. I have tried to be as clear as possible.

clc, clear all

%figure below is mandatory starting condition
b=zeros(16) ;%matrix all zeros
b(5:9,5)=1 ;% left ones
b(7:11,11)=1 ;%right ones
b(5,7:11)=1 ;%top ones
b(11,5:9)=1; %bottom ones
spy(b,40,'g'); % plot picture
a=b;


[y,x]=find(a)%helps find all ones in matrix


for i=1:length(x) %trying to calcule neighbours around each cell containing one
    
    c=a(y(i)+1,x(i))+a(y(i)-1,x(i))+a(y(i),x(i)+1)+a(y(i),x(i)-1)...
    +a(y(i)+1,x(i)+1)+a(y(i)+1,x(i)-1)+a(y(i)-1,x(i)+1)+a(y(i)-1,x(i)-1) 
    %adds up all neighbour cell
    %WANT TO DO: plug c values into vector then change vector(vales) with conditions below 
    %then plug back into matrix a replacing the numbers that were there before
    if c<2
        a(y(i),x(i))=0
    elseif c or(2, 3)
       a(y(i),x(i))=1
    elseif c>3
        a(y(i),x(i))=0
    end
end

Answer 1

[Vimal Rathod]

You could use the conv2 function to find out the elements in the neighbours and then calculate the sum directly.

Below is a link for an answer which could be of use to you.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/402080-how-to-find-the-neighbors-of-each-element-in-a-matrix

For more info about conv2 refer to the following link

https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/conv2.html

hope this helps!