The Game of Life
A game with no players. Four rules, a grid, and then you watch. Place a few cells, press Start and see what happens.
Glider gun: found by a group around Bill Gosper. It fires a new glider every 30 generations, without end.
Tap or click the grid to place cells. Dragging paints, and if you start on a live cell, it erases. With the keyboard: the space bar starts and stops, N moves one generation ahead. Inside the grid the arrow keys move a marker, and Enter sets or clears the cell.
Anything that runs over the edge disappears. Otherwise it would come back in on the other side and, for example, shoot the glider gun to pieces.
The four rules
The board is a grid of squares. Each square is a cell, and it's either alive or dead. Every cell has eight neighbors. Each generation, every cell looks only at those eight. Then:
- Loneliness. A live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.
- Survival. With two or three neighbors it lives on.
- Overcrowding. With more than three neighbors it dies.
- Birth. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors comes alive.
That's it. There are no other rules. No goal, no plan, no player.
It just happens
Only four rules, and still the board blinks, travels, collides and freezes. None of that is in the rules. It just happens. There's a word for that: emergence. The whole can do something that none of its parts can.
The game was invented by the British mathematician John Conway. It became famous in 1970 through a column by Martin Gardner in Scientific American. Conway offered 50 dollars to anyone who could show whether a pattern can grow forever. The answer was the glider gun found by a group around Bill Gosper.
Watch the episode: No Atom in You Is Alive. So Why Are You? Sources for the episode