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)) _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor