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)

Highway robber

Any mechanism that can retrieve a signal from a spaceship lane while allowing spaceships on nearby lanes to pass by unaffected. In practice the spaceship is generally a glider. The signal is removed from the lane, an output signal is generated elsewhere, and the highway robber returns to its original state. A competent highway robber does not affect gliders even on the lane adjacent to the affected glider stream, except during its recovery period.

A perfect highway robber doesn't affect later gliders even in the lane to which it is attached, even during its recovery period. Below is a near-perfect highway robber "bait" that requires three synchronized signals to rebuild (the Herschel, B-heptomino, and glider.) The glider at the top right passes by unharmed, but another glider following on the same lane 200 ticks later will be cleanly reflected to a new path, and another glider following that one will also pass by unharmed. The only imperfection is a few ticks at the very end of the reconstruction, as the beehive is being rebuilt:

Game of Life pattern ’highway_robber’

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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