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)

GIG

A glider injection gate. This is a device for injecting a glider into a glider stream. The injected glider is synthesized from one or more incoming spaceships assisted by the presence of the GIG. (This contrasts with some other glider injection reactions which do not require a GIG, as in inject.) Gliders already in the glider stream pass through the GIG without interfering with it. A GIG usually consists of a small number of oscillators.

For example, in July 1996 Dieter Leithner found the following reaction which allows the construction of a pseudo-period 14 glider stream. It uses two LWSS streams, a pentadecathlon and a volcano.

Game of Life pattern ’GIG’

Glider injection gates are useful for building glider guns with pseudo-periods that are of the form nd, where n is a positive integer, and d is a proper divisor of some convenient base gun period (such as 30 or 46), with d > 13.

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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