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)

Slow glider construction

Construction an object by a "slow salvo" of gliders all coming from the same direction, in such a way that timing of the gliders does not matter as long as they are not too close behind one another. This type of construction requires an initial seed object, such as a block, which is modified by each glider in turn until the desired object is produced.

In May 1997, Nick Gotts produced a slow glider construction of a block-laying switch engine from a block, using a slow salvo of 53 gliders. Constructions like this are important in the study of sparse Life, as they will occur naturally as gliders created in the first few generations collide with blonks and other debris.

Slow glider constructions are also useful in some designs for universal constructors. However, in this case the above definition is usually too restrictive, and it is desirable to allow constructions in which some gliders in the salvo are required to have a particular timing modulo 2 (a "p2 slow salvo"). This gives much greater flexibility, as blinkers can now be freely used in the intermediate construction steps. The Snarkmaker is a very large p2 slow salvo. A much smaller example is the following edgy construction of an eater1 starting from a block.

Game of Life pattern ’slow_glider_construction’

Adam P. Goucher's slmake search program, made available in May 2017, makes it much easier to find a slow glider construction for a wide variety of stable circuitry.

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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