Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life
Designer	John Horton Conway
Topic	Universal Turing Machine
Preparation	None
Time	5 minutess
No. of roles/players	1, viewer
Archive of Simulations and Games for the Enhancement of the Learning Experience Supported by

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 "life 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.

The game of Life is a prototypical example of a cellular automaton, an automatic machine of cells. It has attracted interests of researchers in diverse fields. Conway's game of Life is a universal Turing machine.

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

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

Try your hands

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 purging it or editing it again. )

• 

  it may look like this after saving

Sandbox

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See also

• Wikiversity:Tributes for Mirwin (there is another subst: Game of Life)
• wikipedia:Conway's Game of Life
• commons:Game of Life

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