{"id":21173,"date":"2020-05-30T23:57:47","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T15:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stuif.com\/blog\/?p=21173"},"modified":"2020-05-31T00:33:12","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T16:33:12","slug":"the-game-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stuif.com\/blog\/?p=21173","title":{"rendered":"The Game of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Last month the English mathematician John Conway<\/a> passed away at the age of 80. His name may not be familiar to many of you, but he was the inventor of the Game of Life<\/a>, in 1970. For several years I have been interested in this game. A suitable time to write a blog about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Conway was still an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the sixties, he became interested in “recreational” mathematics and got in contact with Martin Gardner, who had a popular column “Mathematical Games” in the Scientific American. In October 1970 Gardner published in this column The fantastic combinations of John Conway’s new solitaire game “life”<\/a> Read here<\/a> and here<\/a> interviews with Conway about how he invented the game and that for a long time he actually hated it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The game is played on a grid of adjoining cells, which can be either alive (black) or dead (white). Each cell is surrounded by eight neighbouring cells and what happens to a cell depends on how many neighbours are alive. These are the rules:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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1. When a living cell has 0 or 1 living neighbours, it will die.
2. A living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbours will stay alive.
3. A living cell with 4 or more living neighbours will die.
4. A dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbours will become alive.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

With zero or one neighbours you will die from loneliness, with four or more neighbours you die from overcrowding. With two or three neighbours you survive and when there are three parents around, a new baby is born. It looks a bit like life \ud83d\ude09 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course other rules are also possible and it took Conway considerable time to find rules that gave interesting results. As there were hardly any computers in those days, they used a go<\/a> board to follow the development of (simple) patterns!<\/p>\n\n\n\n