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)

F171

An elementary conduit, the seventeenth Herschel conduit, discovered by Brice Due in August 2006 in a search using only eaters as catalysts. This was the first new Herschel conduit discovery since 1998. After 171 ticks, it produces a Herschel at (29, -17) relative to the input. A ghost Herschel in the pattern below marks the output location:

Game of Life pattern ’F171’

The conduit's recovery time is 227 ticks, slower than many of the original sixteen conduits because of the delayed destruction of a temporary blinker, though the circuit itself is clearly Spartan. The recovery time can be improved to 120 ticks by adding sparkers of various periods to suppress the blinker. See clock for a period-2 example.

The central eater in the group of three to the northwest can be removed to release an additional glider output signal on a transparent lane.

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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