PL. 24 · AUTOMATA / AUTOMATON / 2D TOTALISTIC
Game of Life
John Horton Conway, 1970
OPEN THE LIVE PLATE ▸DEFINITION
live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours survives dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbours is born
NOTES
Two rules on a square grid, and the result is Turing complete. Conway wanted the simplest set of rules where neither explosive growth nor extinction was obvious, and he found it by hand with a Go board. He came to resent how thoroughly it overshadowed the rest of his mathematics.
PROVENANCE
- Origin
- J. H. Conway, 1970; popularised by Martin Gardner in Scientific American
- Standing
- Public domain — two transition rules
- Constants
- Initial density near 0.3 gives the longest-lived soups