Conway's Game Of Life

Date
21 October 2007

Mathematics students will likely be familiar with this, but as I’m no friend of numbers, it came to me (via Tom) as a pleasant surprise.

Created by a British mathematician, the Game Of Life is an exploration of cellular activity set on a square grid. At any one time, a square (or cell) is either ‘live’ or ‘dead’ and affects its neighbours either way. Any live cell with less than two live neighbours, dies, ‘as if by loneliness’ says the “Wikipedia” entry. Any cell with more than three live neighbours, dies, ‘as if by overcrowding’. The result is a series of animated patterns that run by themselves determined by the rules of the model.

It’s sort of spectacularly dry and fascinating at the same time, but definitely worth a play all the same. Just click the Enjoy Life button in the top left of the screen, open some of the patterns, and set them working.

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Jez Burrows

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