Game Groups > Game of Life versions

Various implementations of John Horton Conway's mathematical cellular automata simulation the Game of Life (and not the Milton-Bradley board game of the same name.)

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.

The first computer implementation of Conway's Life, in 1970 quick on the heels of the game's initial introduction, was made for the PDP-7 by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne.

Trivia

The Game of Life was originally conceived using plates put on Conway's tiled kitchen floor.

Information also contributed by Игги Друге and Pseudo_Intellectual