Conway's Game of Life

Introduction

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.

Rules

The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations.

Why is it interesting?

Cellular automatons are used in many fields such as: computability theory, mathematics, physics, complexity science, theoretical biology and microstructure modeling.

For example, some biological processes occur - or can be simulated - by cellular automata.

The Game of Life

Instructions:

• Click with your mouse to switch between live (blue) and dead (green) cells.
• Press ENTER on your keyboard to compute one iteration.
• Press SPACE to reset.
• Press i to toggle additional information.

Try to find so-called "oscillators" and "spaceships" (look at the first link at the bottom of this page)!!!

Further information

If you want to read about this very intersting topic visit these two links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton

Note: I took part of the text from the two pages I just referenced.