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)

R64

An elementary conduit, one of the original sixteen Herschel conduits, discovered by Dave Buckingham in September 1995. After 64 ticks, it produces a Herschel rotated 90 degrees clockwise at (11, 9) relative to the input. Its recovery time is 153 ticks, though this can be improved to 61 ticks by adding a from-the-side eater inside the turn to avoid interference from the output Herschel's first natural glider, as shown below. A ghost Herschel in the pattern below marks the output location:

Game of Life pattern ’R64’

R64 is one of the simplest known Spartan conduits, one of the two known Blockic conduits, and one of the few elementary conduits in the original set of sixteen. See also p256 gun.

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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