Conway's Game of Life  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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single Gosper's Glider Gun creating "gliders" A screenshot of a
puffer-type breeder (red) that leaves glider guns (green) in its
wake, which in turn create gliders (blue). (animation)
Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by
mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a
hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and
succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine
with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. The Game of
Life emerged as Conway's successful attempt to drastically
simplify von Neumann's ideas. The game made its first public
appearance in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, in
Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. From a theoretical
point of view, it is interesting because it has the power of a
universal Turing machine: that is, anything that can be computed
algorithmically can be compu