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)

Sparking eater

One of two eaters found in April 1997 and November 1998 by Dean Hickerson using his dr search program, shown below to the left and right respectively. These both absorb gliders as a standard eater does, but also produce separated single-bit sparks at the upper right, which can be used to delete antiparallel gliders with different phases as shown.

Game of Life pattern ’sparking_eater’

The above mechanisms can be used to build intermitting glider guns. The left-hand eater produces a spark nine ticks after a glider impact, with the result that the period of the constituent guns can't be a multiple of 4. The right-hand eater produces the same spark ten ticks after impact, which allows p4N guns to be used.

The separation of the spark also allows this reaction to perform other perturbations "around the corner" of some objects. For example, it was used by Jason Summers in 2004 to cap the ends of a row of ten AK47 reactions to form a much smaller period 94 glider gun than the original one. (This is now made obsolete by the AK94 gun.)

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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