Description
Some programs conventionally considered games are simulators that have been described as "software toys", such as
Little Computer People or the iterations of
Will Wright's Sim franchise, concerning themselves with the life cycles of simulated entities; in
The Sims, it's the lives and deaths of people being simulated, while in Conway's Game of Life, it's the lives and deaths of single-celled entities (or "cellular automata".)
These entities live on cells of a flat, 2D binary Cartesian grid and their life and reproduction is dictated according to a few demanding conditions. From step to step, their amount of adjacent neighbours (above, below, on the sides and diagonally) are measured: fewer than two or more than three, and the inhabitant of the cell will die; exactly two or three and they will remain stable; finally, any uninhabited square with three neighbours will spawn forth a new entity.
The player is a Newtonian clockmaker god, arranging starting conditions of cell locations on the grid and then setting the system into motion to continue, untouched and unabated, as the game plays itself, evolving, and generations of cells tick along and produce kaleidoscopic patterns, flickering oscillators and stubborn, stable little clumps and lumps (or "still lifes").
The game was originally worked out slowly, by hand, on grid paper, blackboard or using tiles on a
Go board, after being popularized in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in
Scientific American in October 1970, but increasing availability of computers have enormously expanded the options available (and enormously reduced the time and labour needed) to cell pattern researchers.
Alternate Titles
- "Z-Life" -- Julian Arnold's 1996 Inform abuse
- "lifeG" -- Jean-Francois Heon's 2003 Python implementation
- "Life32" -- Johann Bontes' Win32 implementation
- "Conway of Life" -- Philippe Lesire's Windows implementation
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Trivia
John Horton Conway's inspirations for this game included
John Von Neumann's notion of self-replicating machines and
John Leech's problems in group theory.
Upon initial publication, Conway offered a $50 prize to anyone who could devise a pattern within the year that would grow and expand indefinitely -- a prize claimed by
Bill Gosper of MIT and since expanded to a wide range of "guns" and "gliders."
A curious side-effect of these growing patterns is that the conditions provided by the stock rules of the Game of Life make it a Universal Turing machine, predictable cell population movements providing analogues to counters, logic gates and finite state machines.
