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)

Phoenix

Any pattern all of whose cells die in every generation, but which never dies as a whole. A spaceship cannot be a phoenix, and in fact every finite phoenix eventually evolves into an oscillator. The following 12-cell oscillator (found by the MIT group in December 1971) is the smallest known phoenix, and is sometimes called simply "the phoenix".

Game of Life pattern ’phoenix_(1)’

This is extensible and is just the first of a family of phoenixes made by joining components together to form a loop. Here is another member of this family.

Game of Life pattern ’phoenix_(2)’

Every known phoenix oscillator has period 2. In January 2000, Stephen Silver showed that a period 3 oscillator cannot be a phoenix. The situation for higher periods is unknown.

An easy synthesis of the phoenix is possible using four blocks as seeds. A puffer creating a growing row of phoenixes has the unusual property that the percentage of live cells that stay alive for more than one generation approaches zero. See lone dot agar for an example of an infinite phoenix.

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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