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)

Pseudo

Opposite of true. A gun emitting a period n stream of spaceships (or rakes) is said to be a pseudo period n gun if its mechanism oscillates with a period greater than n. This period will necessarily be a multiple of n. If the base mechanism's period is instead a fraction of n, then a period multiplier must also be present which is considered to be part of the mechanism, and the gun as a whole is still a true period gun. For example, a filter may be used on a lower-period gun to produce a compound gun such as the true p48 gun.

Pseudo period n glider guns are known to exist for all periods greater than or equal to 14, with smaller periods being impossible. All known p14 guns are pseudo guns requiring several signal injections, so they are quite large. The following smaller example is a pseudo period 123 gun, interleaving the streams from two true period 246 guns:

Game of Life pattern ’pseudo’

The same distinction between true and pseudo also exists for puffers.

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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