Conway's Game of Life

In this learning project we explore Conway's Game of Life. The game involves an (infinite) two-dimensional grid with black and white squares, which may be represented as 1 and 0. One may think of them as "live cells" or "dead cells". The grid evolves. The evolution rule is as follows:

• All cells evolve simultaneously
• Each cell has eight neighbours
• An alive cell with two or three neighbours continues to live. Otherwise it dies.
• A dead cell with exactly three neighbours will become alive.

Conway's Game of Life
Designer	John Horton Conway
Topic	Cellular automata
Preparation	None
Time	5 minutes
No. of roles/players	1, viewer
Archive of Simulations and Games for the Enhancement of the Learning Experience The individual resources in this archive come from diverse sources. They have been brought together into this archive in a project supported by

Conway's Game of Life Glider Gun

From these simple forms it is possible to create stable and recursive patterns, such as the Gosper Glider Gun (illustrated).

The Game of Life is a prototypical example of a cellular automaton, an automatic machine of cells. It has attracted the interest of researchers in diverse fields. Patterns in Conway's Game of Life have been shown to be capable of emulating a universal Turing machine.

For more details and context, see w:Conway's Game of Life.

Try your hand

You may try your hand on the following (finite!) 10x10 toroidal model of the Game of Life by:

• pressing the "edit this page" button on the top of the page and
• then the "Save page" button below the editing window.

(If it doesn't seem to work, there may be a cache problem. Try [http://https://en.wikiversity.org/ title=Conway's_Game_of_Life&action=purge purging it] or editing it again. )

• 
  it may look like this after saving

Sandbox

See also

• Wikiversity:Tributes for Mirwin (there is another subst: Game of Life)
• wikipedia:Conway's Game of Life
• commons:Game of Life