Game of Life

The rules underlying Life are simple, according to computer scientists. Biologists are inclined to be skeptical, but they do agree that the cellular automaton known as the Game of Life provides fascinating insights into the phenomena of self-organization and emergence in systems of interacting agents. Biological life has been around for at least 3.8 billion years, but the Game of Life was invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970 and publicized by Martin Gardner in his "Mathematical Games " column in Scientific American. It is probably the best-known example of the class of algorithms known as cellular automata (CA). A CA is a one- or two-dimensional array of cells, each of which can exist in a number of states. Time in a CA is discrete; at each time step every cell updates itself on the basis of its current state and those of its neighbors. Cellular automata can exhibit surprisingly complex global temporal dynamics, arising from extremely simple rules applied on a local scale. The standard Game of Life uses a two-dimensional grid. Cells can be either on (alive) or off (dead). The neighbourhood of a cell is the eight cells surrounding it. The rules of Life are, indeed, simple; if a live cell has two or three live neighbors, it stays alive. A dead cel