Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life
Designer	John Horton Conway
Topic	Cellular automata
Preparation	None
Time	5 minutes
No. of roles/players	1, viewer
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Conway's Game of Life
Glider Gun

In this learning project we explore Conway's Game of Life. The game involves an (infinite) two-dimensional grid with black and white squares, which may be represented as 1 and 0. One may think of them as "live cells" or "dead cells". The grid evolves. The evolution rule is as follows:

All cells evolve simultaneously
Each cell has eight neighbours
An alive cell with two or three neighbours continues to live. Otherwise it dies.
A dead cell with exactly three neighbours will become alive.

From these simple forms it is possible to create stable and recursive patterns, such as the Gosper Glider Gun (illustrated).

The Game of Life is a prototypical example of a cellular automaton, an automatic machine of cells. It has attracted the interest of researchers in diverse fields. Patterns in Conway's Game of Life have been shown to be capable of emulating a universal Turing machine.

For more details and context, see w:Conway's Game of Life.

Try your hand

You may try your hand on the following (finite!) 10x10 toroidal model of the Game of Life by:

pressing the "edit this page" button on the top of the page and
then the "Save page" button below the editing window.

(If it doesn't seem to work, there may be a cache problem. Try [http://https://en.wikiversity.org/ title=Conway's_Game_of_Life&action=purge purging it] or editing it again. )

it may look like this after saving

Conway's Game of Life

Try your hand

Sandbox

See also