More about the Game of life

It isn't really a game, since all you do is choose some initial starting pattern and watch how it develops, and it is only loosely connected to life, but the real significance of the game of life and of all cellular automata is that they provide a model of computation which, as Conway proved, is as powerful as a Turing machine, and therefore as powerful as any computer today.

It occurs on an unlimited grid of square cells, and each cell can have two states, which Conway called alive and dead. The system evolves generation by generation. In each generation, the cells live or die depending on their own state and that of their immediate neighbours in the previous generation.

If a cell has 0 or 1 neighbours, in the next generation it dies (of loneliness) and if it has more than 3 then it dies (of overcrowding).If it has 2 or 3 neighbours then it lives, and if an empty cell has exactly 3 neighbours then it comes alive.