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.
The colour of a glider can be defined as follows. First choose some cell to be the origin. This cell is then considered to be white, and all other cells to be black or white in a checkerboard pattern. (So the cell with coordinates (m,n) is white if m+n is even, and black otherwise.) Then the colour of a glider is the colour of its leading cell when it is in a phase that can be rotated to look like this:
A reflector that does not change the colour of gliders obviously cannot be used to move a glider onto a path of different colour than it started on. But a 90-degree reflector that does change the colour of gliders is similarly limited, as the colour of the resulting glider will depend only on the direction of the glider, no matter how many reflectors are used. For maximum flexibility, therefore, both types of reflector are required.
Small periodic colour-changing glider reflectors (bouncers) are known, and also small periodic colour-preserving glider reflectors (bumpers). Among stable patterns, only a small colour-preserving reflector (Snark) is known. The smallest known 90-degree colour-changing reflector is given at the end of the reflector entry.
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.
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.
Each cell with three neighbors becomes populated.
Video’s about the Game of Life
Interesting articles about John Conway
Implemented by Edwin Martin <edwin@bitstorm.org>