Game of Life pointers - c

Question

I am creating game of Life in C and I am getting this segmentation fault (core dumped) error after the program takes input from user. I recently started learning C and my understanding of pointers is basic .I have not been able to find a fix for it after looking online and trying different ways to get it right. If i dont use pointers and keep it simple everything works right.I would appreciate any help
int main() {
int maxR;
int maxC;
int generations;
int i=0;
int j=0;
int k=0;
int n; //neighbour count
char state;
char **board; //original boardfor comparison
char **newBoard; //boardto make changes to
scanf("%d %d %d",&maxR,&maxC,&generations); //take input
board= (char**)malloc(maxR * sizeof(char*)); //allocating memory
newBoard=(char**) malloc(maxR * sizeof(char*)); //allocating memory
for(i=0; i<maxR; i++) {
board[i] = malloc(maxC * sizeof (char)); //allocating memory
newBoard[i] = malloc(maxC * sizeof (char)); //allocating memory
for(j=0; j<maxC; j++) {
scanf (" %c", &board[i][j]); //getting input
}
}
for(i=0; i<=generations; i++ ) {
for (j=0; j<maxR; j++) {
for (k=0; k<maxC; k++) {
state=board[j][k];
n=countNeighbours(board,maxR,maxC,j,k);
if(state == '1') { //if the cell is alive
if(n==2 || n==3) newBoard[j][k] = '1'; //if the cell has 2 or 3 neighbours then it lives
else newBoard[j][k]='0'; //else the cell dies
} else { //else (if) the cell is dead
if(n==3) newBoard[j][k]='1'; //but has 3 neibours then the cell become alive
else newBoard[i][j]='0'; //else it dies
}
}
}
memcpy(board, newBoard,sizeof(board)); //copy the updated grid to the old one
}
printBoard(board,maxR,maxC);
deallocate(board,maxR); //deallocatethe memory
deallocate(copyGrid,maxR); //deallocatethe memory

Answer 1

There's one obvious problem here.
memcpy(oldGrid, copyGrid,sizeof(oldGrid)); //copy the updated grid to the old one
As oldGrid is a char** pointer, then sizeof(oldGrid) is the size of a pointer, which is probably 4 or 8 bytes depending on your platform. So, you're not copying the grid, you're only copying a few bytes of it.
If you want to copy the whole grid, you need to work out the size of the grid in bytes.
If oldGrid was declared as an array, instead of a pointer, then sizeof(oldGrid) would yield the full size of the grid as you expect. Arrays behave differently from pointers when it comes to sizeof().