Conway’s Game of Life

..O...... OO....... O..OOO..O O....OOO. .OOO..OO. ......... .OOO..OO. O....OOO. O..OOO..O OO....... ..O......

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)

X66

Found by Hartmut Holzwart, July 1992. Half of this can be escorted by an HWSS. The name refers to the fact that every cell (live or dead) has at most 6 live neighbours (in contrast to spaceships based on LWSS, MWSS or HWSS). In fact this spaceship was found by a search with this restriction.

Game of Life pattern ’x66’

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.

Game of Life 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

Videos about the Game of Life

Stephen Hawkings The Meaning of Life (John Conway's Game of Life segment)
The rules are explained in Stephen Hawking’s 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

This site is made by Edwin Martin <>