Conway’s Game of Life
It was the October of 1970 and the monthly magazine “Scientific American" had a peculiarly interesting article on an apparent game called “life". That issue of the magazine grew up to be the most sold at the time. The game was The Game of Life by John Horton Conway, an English mathematician. Dr. Conway calls the game a “zero-player" game which accurately describes the amusement you can achieve by just observing the patterns transform from afar. The game was simple, it had 3 easy rules which may seem incredibly easy to build. Who wouldn’t be able to come up with three rules? However, it took Conway a considerate amount of time to carefully craft these three rules that would now be called the most popular Cellular Automaton ever created. The scarcity of rules in the game of life leaves it with surprisingly few constraints; a game with a million rules, obviously, leaves a lot of constraints on what the game can achieve. You might question the game’s notability considering the simplistic behaviour of the rules but numerous researches still go on till this day on the game with incredible formality.
The Rules
The three very simple rules of the game allows the game to be even played on a chess or a Reversi board. A particular “cell" can have 2 states: alive or dead. To determine a cell’s state in the next generation, its neighbours are addressed. Every cell (except the corner cells) have 8 neighbours.
Looking at one cell, you look at the following three rules and change the state of the cell.
- Survival: Every cell with 2 or 3 alive neighbours, stays alive.
- Death: Every cell with 4 or more neighbours dies as if by overpopulation, and every cell with 1 or less neighbour dies as if by underpopulation.
- Birth: Cells with exactly 3 neighbours are born.
Those three very simple rules are the pillars of the game of life and are the reason why it’s still loved by computer scientists and mathematicians.
Read More About The Amazing Game Of Life in the Complete Article.