LIFE

• Cellular Automation, devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.
• Zero-player game
• Universe is an infinite two-dimensional grid, each of which has two states, alive or dead.
• Each cell is surrounded by eight neighbours

Transition Rules

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

Examples of patterns

• Many different types of patterns occur in the Game of Life, which are classified according to their behaviour. Common patterns are:

1. Still lifes
   • do not change from one generation to next.
2. Oscilators
   • return to their initial state after a finite number of generations.
3. Spaceships
   • translate themselves across the grid.