History VideoGame / ConwaysGameOfLife

A website which allows you to tinker around with Life patterns can be found [[http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/ here.]]#

Its author, John Horton Conway, died in 2020 at the age of 82, a victim of the COVID-19 pandemic.

* ''[[{{Webcomic/Mezzacotta}} Square Root of Minus Garfield]]'''s "[[http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=448 Garfield, Infinite Canvas, and The Game of Life]]", in which a ''ComicStrip/{{Garfield}}'' comic about not having a life is used as the starting state for the Game of Life.
* ''Glory Season'' by Creator/DavidBrin features this game with the variation of being played as a contest, with each side getting part of the board to use, with the goal being eliminating the other side.
* One of the intro cinematics for ''VideoGame/{{Darwinia}}'' is a simulation of Life, with the added caveats that the grid is confined to a finite space and each Darwinian will die after a set number of years no matter what. As it's incredibly difficult not to get attached to the little guys while playing Darwinia, seeing the last "block" and "spaceship" formations settle, flicker, and die can be [[TearJerker very haunting]]. In-universe, it was given to the Darwinians to teach them mortality.
* An element in the ''VideoGame/BoulderDash'' clone ''VideoGame/RocksNDiamonds''.
* In Creator/LyndonHardy's 1988 novel ''Riddle of the Seven Realms'', a character creates a dimension that operates under these rules, even calling it "the realm of the conways."

--> '''ZUN''': "You might not understand this if you didn't study at a technical college."
* In ''VideoGame/SystemShock'', the walls, floors and ceilings of the virtual CyberSpace environment are square grids that light up in patterns that are seemingly arbitrary, until you realize they're following rules from the Game of Life.
* In ''VideoGame/{{ADOM}}'', herbs grow this way. [[spoiler:[[GameBreaker With the right preparations, you can grow an near-infinite number of herbs in the "Big Room" of the Caverns of Chaos.]]]]
* The ''Literature/WWWTrilogy'''s first book has Caitlin seeing cellular automata in the background of her "websight;" Dr. Kuroda brings up the Game of Life as an example of cellular automata while explaining it.
* The WebOriginal/OrionsArm Project has, among artifacts of unclear origin, a [[https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/46412766e34ef planet sized Life field]]. Apparently, it's been played long enough for life to evolve in the game.

A website which allows you to tinker around with Life patterns can be found [[http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/ here.]]

* ''Tea With The Black Dragon'' by Creator/RAMacAvoy has a metaphorically-significant scene in which the protagonist is introduced to the game.

* One of the intro cinematics for ''VideoGame/{{Darwinia}}'' is a simulation of Life, with the added caveat that each Darwinian will die after a set number of years no matter what. As it's incredibly difficult not to get attached to the little guys while playing Darwinia, seeing the last "block" and "spaceship" formations settle, flicker, and die can be [[TearJerker very haunting]].

See [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life this page]] on TheOtherWiki for more information.

[[quoteright:92:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/GameOfLife_glider_9201.png]]
[[caption-width-right:92:The "glider" is a pattern that moves 1 cell diagonally every 4 generations.]]

Not to be confused with [[TabletopGame/GameOfLife Milton Bradley's board game]]. For stories about your everyday world suddenly taking on these rules, see [[SuddenGameInterface Life Is A Game]].

Not to be confused with [[TabletopGame/GameOfLife Milton Bradley's board game]].

By carefully arranging cells in the Game of Life, it is even possible to build new things; "guns" which fire streams of "gliders" continuously, "reflectors" which can bounce gliders around, patterns that grow continuously, and more. Eventually, it was discovered that one can implement logical structures in the Game of Life and build a universal computer; that is, the Game of Life is Turing-complete.

Although these rules are trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life is that the resulting cell interactions are astonishingly complex. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form; tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that "blink" over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can ''move'', autonomously of other cells. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique "universe" with its own physical laws.

* WrapAround: It is common for implementations of the Life grid to wrap around at the edges, as otherwise the edge of the world can interfere with the automaton (a cell at the edge can only have at most 5 neighbors, or 3 in the corners).

* WrapAround: It is common for the Life grid to wrap around at the edges, as otherwise the edge of the world can interfere with the automaton (a cell at the edge can only have at most 5 neighbors, or 3 in the corners).

* In ''SystemShock'', the walls, floors and ceilings of the virtual CyberSpace environment are square grids that light up in patterns that are seemingly arbitrary, until you realize they're following rules from the Game of Life.

* FollowTheLeader: The Game of Life is one of a distinct class of cellular automata: to be specific, it is a 2-dimensional, 2-state, orthogonal, outer-totalistic cellular automaton that obeys the B23/S3 rule within a Moore neighborhood. The "B3/S23" is the important part, as that's the encoding of the birth/survival rules that give Life its uniquely dynamic properties. However, there are a vast number of ''other'' rules that can also be used, and many of these have been explored too. In honor of the Game of Life, they are referred to as "Life-likes".

* If a dead cell has exactly 3 neighboring cells, it becomes alive.
* If a live cell has either 2 or 3 neighboring cells, it becomes dead.

Although these rules seem trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life is that the resulting cell interactions are astonishingly complex. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form; tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that "blink" over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can ''move'', autonomously of other cells. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique "universe" with its own physical laws.

* FollowTheLeader: The Game of Life is one of a distinct class of cellular automata: to be specific, it is a 2-dimensional, 2-state, orthogonal, outer-totalistic cellular automaton that obeys the B23/S3 rule within a Moore neighborhood. The "B23/S3" is the important part, as that's the encoding of the birth/survival rules that give Life its uniquely dynamic properties. However, there are a vast number of ''other'' rules that can also be used, and many of these have been explored too. In honor of the Game of Life, they are referred to as "Life-likes".

* TropeCodifier: The Game of Life was not the first cellular automaton. The concept originated in the 1940s, and the first actual cellular automaton was devised by John von Neumann in the 1950s. However, Conway's automaton is the best-known and most widely explored. Part of this is due to its simplicity: the automaton can be summed up in just a few sentences and implemented in only a few lines of code.

A cellular automaton is a grid of simple "cells", each of which has a state that can change depending on how it interacts with its neighbors. In the case of the Game of Life, the rules are extremely simple:

Although these rules seem trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life that the resulting cell interactions are astonishingly complex. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form; tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that "blink" over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can ''move'', autonomously of other cells. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique "universe" with its own physical laws.

Although these rules seem completely trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life that the resulting cell interactions are ''astonishingly'' complex. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form; tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that "blink" over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can ''move'', autonomously of other cells. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique "universe" with its own physical laws.

* FollowTheLeader: The Game of Life is one of a distinct class of cellular automata: to be specific, it is a 2-dimensional, 2-state, orthogonal, totalistic cellular automaton that obeys the B23/S3 rule within a Moore neighborhood. The "B23/S3" is the important part, as that's the encoding of the birth/survival rules that give Life its uniquely dynamic properties. However, there are a vast number of ''other'' rules that can also be used, and many of these have been explored too. In honor of the Game of Life, they are referred to as "Life-likes".

* FollowTheLeader: The Game of Life is one of a distinct class of cellular automata: to be specific, it is a 2-dimensional, 2-state, orthogonal, totalistic cellular automaton that uses the B23/S3 rule with a Moore neighborhood. The "B23/S3" is the important part here, as that's the encoding of the birth/survival rules that give Life its uniquely dynamic properties. However, there are a vast number of ''other'' rules that can also be used, and many of these have been explored too. In honor of the Game of Life, they are referred to as "Life-likes".

Although these rules seem completely trivial, the surprise of the Game of Life that the resulting cell interactions are ''astonishingly'' complex. From the chaotic interactions, stable patterns can be seen to form; tiny formations of cells that stabilise each other, oscillating formations that "blink" over and over, and perhaps most interesting of all, cell formations that can ''move'', autonomously of the main mass of cells. The Game of Life could be considered a simulation of a unique "universe" with its own physical laws.

The Game of Life is a mind-bogglingly complex universe-simulator invented by the mathematician John Conway. Based around an infinite grid and a few simple rules, it gives a new meaning to emergent complexity. Each tile on the grid can exist in one of two states: the default "dead" state, or "live". Given a blank, dead grid, a player then seeds the canvas with little colonies of "live" squares. A live square that is neighbored by fewer than two, or more than three, other live squares dies. A dead square that is bordered by exactly three live squares becomes live. A website which allows you to tinker around with Life patterns can be found [[http://www.ibiblio.org/lifepatterns/ here.]]