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)

Herschel transmitter

Any Herschel-to-two-glider converter that produces a tandem glider that can be used as input to a Herschel receiver. If the gliders are far enough apart, and if one of the gliders is used only for cleanup, then the transmitter is ambidextrous: with a small modification to the receiver, a suitably oriented mirror image of the receiver will also work.

The following diagram shows a stable Herschel transmitter found by Paul Callahan in May 1997:

Game of Life pattern ’Herschel_transmitter’

Examples of small reversible p6 and p7 transmitters are also known, and more recently several alternate Herschel transceivers have been found with different lane spacing, e.g., 0, 2, 4, 6, and 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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