launtpc SG No, not that ripoff board game. It is the Game Of Life, a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. You might find this interesting/familiar... It is a no-player game... that is, everything is done by the computer, and humans observe the behavior of the pixels (called "cells"). The rules are simple and elegant: Births and deaths occur simultaneously. Together they constitute a single generation or "tick" in the complete "life history" of the initial configuration. There are all sorts of different patterns that occur in the Game of Life, including static patterns ("still lifes"), repeating patterns ("oscillators" - a superset of still lifes), and patterns that translate themselves across the board ("spaceships"). The simplest examples of these three classes are shown below, with live cells shown in black, and dead cells shown in white. Still Life -- Block Oscillators -- Blinker Oscillators -- Toad Spaceships -- glider Spaceships -- LWSS (light weight spaceship)
