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)

Edge-repair spaceship

A spaceship which has an edge that possesses no spark and yet is able to perturb things because of its ability to repair certain types of damage to itself. The most useful examples are the following two small p3 c/3 spaceships:

Game of Life pattern ’edge-repair_spaceship_(1)’

These were found by David Bell in 1992, but the usefulness of the edge-repair property wasn't recognised until July 1997. The following diagram (showing an edge-repair spaceship deleting a Herschel) demonstrates the self-repairing action.

Game of Life pattern ’edge-repair_spaceship_(2)’

In October 2000, David Bell found that a T-tetromino component of a c/4 spaceship can also be self-repairing. Stephen Silver noticed that it could be used to delete beehives and, in November 2000, found the smallest known c/4 spaceship with this edge-repair component - in fact, two copies of the component:

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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