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)

RF28B

A converter with several known forms, many of which found by Dave Buckingham in 1972 and in the early 1980s. It accepts an R-pentomino as input and produces an output B-heptomino 28 ticks later. Of nine major variants known as of July 2018, four versions are shown below. For each version, the R-pentomino inputs are shown near the left and right edges, along with the B-heptomino output locations near the center.

Game of Life pattern ’RF28B’

The version in the southeast is used in Paul Callahan's Herschel receiver. The one in the northwest is part of L156, but can be replaced by the variant in the northeast which produces a forward glider output.

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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