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)

C/6 spaceship

A spaceship travelling at one sixth of the speed of light. The first such spaceship to be discovered was the dragon, found by Paul Tooke in April 2000. The first diagonally moving example was the seal, found by Nicolay Beluchenko in September 2005. Another orthogonal c/6 spaceship, found by Paul Tooke in March 2006, is shown below. For the smallest known c/6 spaceship see 56P6H1V0.

Game of Life pattern ’c;6_spaceship’

A Caterloopillar can theoretically be configured to move at c/6, but there are technical difficulties with speeds of the form 4n+2, and as of July 2018 this has not been done in practice.

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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