Conway's Game of Life
Conway's Life

    The first popular cellular automata based
   artificial life simulation.  Life was invented by British
   mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first
   introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year.

   Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and
   "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house.
   Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the
   plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a
   checkerboard and then moved to running Life as a computer
   program on a PDP-7.  That first implementation of Life as a
   computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and
   S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell).

   Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells
   each of which is updated at each step according to the
   previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell
   with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies.
   A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive.
   Other cells do not change.

   While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise
   are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence
   the name "Life".

   Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life,
   and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the
   mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper
   at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see
   Gosperism).  When a hacker mentions "life", he is more
   likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast
   cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of
   existence.

   <On-line implementation>.

   ["Scientific American" 223, October 1970, p120-123, 224;
   February 1971 p121-117, Martin Gardner].

   ["The Garden in The Machine: the Emerging Science of
   Artificial Life", Claus Emmeche, 1994].

   ["Winning Ways, For Your Mathematical Plays", Elwyn
   R. Berlekamp, John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, 1982].

   ["The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of
   Scientific Knowledge", William Poundstone, 1985].

   [Jargon File]

   (1997-09-07)