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)

Demultiplexer

A simple Herschel circuit consisting of three eater1s, found by Brice Due in August 2006. An input Herschel places a boat in a location accessible to an input glider. If the boat is present, a one-time turner reaction occurs and the glider is turned 90 degrees onto a new lane.

Game of Life pattern ’demultiplexer’

If the Herschel and boat are removed from the above pattern, the glider passes cleanly through the circuit. It can be used as the "0" output of a one-bit memory cell, where the 90-degree output would be the "1" output. This was the method used to store presence or absence of neighbor metacells in the p1 megacell.

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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