Aduke.1526 net.games utzoo!decvax!duke!trt Thu Dec 17 21:15:02 1981 Re: eiss.107: Game of life "Life" is a solitaire simulation game created by John Horton Con- way, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. "Life" deals with the rise, fall, and alteration of a society of living organisms and displays a fantastic number of possible combinations of events. The game starts out with a simple configuration of organisms, one to a cell, and is played by applying a series of genetic laws to suc- cessive configurations. The rules are deterministic (that is, there is only one series of plays from a given initial configuration) but the interesting aspect of the game is experimentation with different initial configurations to find those which die out, oscillate, or apparently grow without limit. The genetic laws consider the eight neighboring cells of each cell to determine the outcome of its inhabitant, if any, at the next generation. 1. Every inhabitant of a cell with two or three neighboring inhabited cells survives to the next generation. 2. Every inhabitant with four or more neighbors dies from over- population. Every inhabitant with one or zero neighbors dies from isolation. 3. Every empty cell adjacent to exactly three inhabited cells is a birth cell and receives an inhabitant for the next generation. 4. The above rules are applied simultaneously to calculate the configuration for the next generation. Reference: _S_c_i_e_n_t_i_f_i_c _A_m_e_r_i_c_a_n, October 1970, Mathematical Game s Sec- tion, by Martin Gardner. ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.