Conway's Game of Life

The game of life, strangely enough, is not really a game, or alive. It is, however, extremely cool.

The original game of Life was written by a man named James Conway, who is dead. The game takes place on a grid, and each square is either alive, or dead. The rules for determining this are as follows-

Death: If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism "dies"(becomes blank).

Survival: If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation

Birth: If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.

I recommend downloading a program that will run these rules for you, such as TinyLife or playing it on an online version, such as the lovely setup at www.bitstorm.org. Trying to play these rules out by hand is very slow going, and will cause you to be laughed at by "friends".

What the game of Life seems to do most eloquently is demonstrate the amazing complexity inherent in even simple systems, and how stunning order and beauty can be found in even the murkiest times of chaos.

After realizing that which looked like a huge throbbing mass of nothing two turns ago is now a perfectly symmetrical stable system, you will see what I mean. Also, seeing if you can create sets of life that can accomplish specific goals (travel across the screen, shoot out travelers, etc.) is a pleasant affirmation of the fact that structured organisms CAN wander out of a pile of primordial soup. In fact, it's just a matter of time: Darwinians rejoice.

Life is a pleasure to toy with, and yet another wonderful, intriguing thing that the left-brained can blow their time on instead of getting off their collective ass and discovering cold fusion.

— Dan Norton (dan@flakmag.com)