Conway’s Game of Life

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Life Lexicon

This Life lexicon is compiled by Stephen A. Silver from various sources and may be copied, modified and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. See the original credit page for all credits and the original download location. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cordership

Any spaceship based on switch engines. These necessarily move at a speed of c/12 diagonally with a period of 96 or a multiple thereof. The first Cordership was constructed by Dean Hickerson in April 1991, using 13 switch engines. He soon reduced this to 10, and in August 1993 to 7. In July 1998 he reduced it to 6. In January 2004, Paul Tooke found the 3-engine glide symmetric Cordership shown below.

Game of Life pattern ’Cordership’

At the end of 2017, Aidan F. Pierce discovered a clean 2-engine Cordership. There is also an adjustable-length 4-engine Cordership found by Michael Simkin, made up of two identical or mirror-image 2-engine components. The leading pair of switch engines builds a block trail, which are then deleted by the trailing pair.

Corderships generate sparks which can perturb other objects in many ways, especially gliders which can reach them from the side or from behind. Some perturbations reflect gliders back the way they came, and can be used for constructions such as the caber tosser and the infinite glider hotel.

Game of Life Explanation

The Game of Life is not your typical computer game. It is a cellular automaton, and was invented by Cambridge mathematician John Conway.

This game became widely known when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970. It consists of a grid of cells which, based on a few mathematical rules, can live, die or multiply. Depending on the initial conditions, the cells form various patterns throughout the course of the game.

Rules

For a space that is populated:
Examples

Each cell with one or no neighbors dies, as if by solitude.

Each cell with four or more neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.

Each cell with two or three neighbors survives.

For a space that is empty or unpopulated:

Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.

More information

Video’s about the Game of Life

Stephen Hawkings The Meaning of Life (John Conway's Game of Life segment)
The rules are explained in Stephen Hawkings’ documentary The Meaning of Life
Inventing Game of Life (John Conway) - Numberphile
John Conway himself talks about the Game of Life

Interesting articles about John Conway

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