Various attempts have been made to build such self-replicators.Įven decades later, the Game of Life has a strong hobbyist following, and new discoveries are still being made. Conway also proved that it is possible to create a universal constructor in the Game of Life that is, a pattern that can construct other patterns, including itself. Eventually, it was discovered that one can implement logical structures in the Game of Life and build a universal computer that is, the Game of Life is Turing-complete. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique 'universe' with its own physical laws.īy carefully arranging cells in the Game of Life, it is even possible to build new things 'guns' which fire streams of 'gliders' continuously, 'reflectors' which can bounce gliders around, patterns that grow continuously, and more. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that 'blink' over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can move called 'spaceships', autonomously of other cells.

In all other situations, a cell dies (or remains dead).Īlthough these rules are trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life is that the resulting cell interactions are remarkably complex.If a live cell has either 2 or 3 neighboring cells, it stays alive (survival).If a dead cell has exactly 3 neighboring cells, it becomes alive (birth).Each cell can be either alive (on) or dead (off).In the case of the Game of Life, the rules are extremely simple: The title is a somewhat romantic way of referring to a specific cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970.Ī cellular automaton is a large grid of simple 'cells', each of which has a state that can change depending on how it interacts with its neighbors.

The Game of Life (often referred to as 'Conway's Game of Life' for clarity, or just 'Life' for short) is not, technically, a game (or if it is, it's a zero-player game with no objective). The 'glider' is a pattern that moves 1 cell diagonally every 4 generations.

Conway game of life stable