John Conway's Game of Life

The game of life was developed by John Conway in 1970 as a response to an old computation problem put forth by John von Neumann. The game is played on an infinite two-dimensional grid of squares, each of which is either dead or alive/on or off. Every cell relies on its neighbors to determine whether or not it is alive following these rules:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

The initial pattern is what dictates how the system will evolve, each generation is created by applying the rules to the end state of the last generation, where deaths and births occur simultaneously to avoid confusion.

The game of life is a traditional example of a work which is used to describe the nature of cellular automation. Interesting aspects of these rules include stable "living" communities as well as stable groups capable of uni-directional movement and oscillating designs. The most interesting aspect of this game may be the fact that it was originally developed by Conway on a go game board. In fact the first computer program version was created by an undergraduate at Cambridge for an IBM 360. This emphasizes what I think is a very important part of Computational Art, which is that one does not require a computer to create it.