There are different patterns a population can develop, depending on the initial arrangement of the counters. When all dead counters are removed from and all new counters are placed on the checkerboard, a new “generation” of the population is created. All births and deaths of counters occur at the same time, meaning that the player removes and adds counters after Conway’s rules are applied to all counters. A counter is added to an empty cell on the checkerboard (it is born) if the cell has exactly three neighbors. A counter is removed from the checkerboard (it dies) if it has either four or more neighbors or one or no neighbor. A counter is kept on its position on the checkerboard (it survives) if it has two or three neighboring counters. Conway defines three rules for keeping, removing, and adding new counters to the checkerboard.
The basic idea of the Game of Life is to observe how the pattern built by the counters changes when the player repeatedly applies Conway’s rules for “birth, death and survival” of the counters.Ī counter can have a maximum of eight neighboring counters: four orthogonal neighbors, and four diagonal ones. The arrangement of the counters is up to the player. The player begins by positioning a set of counters on the checkerboard this is the initial population of the Game of Life. To play the game without a computer, the player needs a large checkerboard and a lot of counters. The Game of Life can be played with or without a computer.
The game of life rules download#
There exist several websites that provide the Game of Life as a download or as an online game (for example ).
Martin Gardner popularized the Game of Life by writing two articles for his column “Mathematical Games” in the journal Scientific American in 19. It is a simple representation of birth, death, development, and evolution in a population of living organisms, such as bacteria. The Game of Life, or just Life, is a one-person game that was created by the English mathematician
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