I know about it, I’ve seen videos of it, but I have no idea how it works, or why it’s important. I mainly don’t get why it’s become to infamous.
In: Mathematics
>no idea how it works
Conway’s Game of Life is deceptively simple. Given an infinite two-dimensional grid of cells, each of which can either be [dead/empty/unpopulated] or [alive/full/populated], the game obeys the following four rules (neighbor means any of the eight surrounding cells):
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
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 overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
These rules are applied to every cell on the board at once; each iteration is usually called a *tick.*
That’s it; that’s the Game of Life. Set up your board, apply the rules, and watch what unfolds.
>why it’s important
Taken from [its Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway’s_Game_of_Life):
> Since its publication, the Game of Life has attracted much interest because of the surprising ways in which the patterns can evolve. It provides an example of emergence and self-organization. A version of Life that incorporates random fluctuations has been used in physics to study phase transitions and nonequilibrium dynamics. The game can also serve as a didactic analogy, used to convey the somewhat counter-intuitive notion that design and organization can spontaneously emerge in the absence of a designer. For example, philosopher Daniel Dennett has used the analogy of the Game of Life “universe” extensively to illustrate the possible evolution of complex philosophical constructs, such as consciousness and free will, from the relatively simple set of deterministic physical laws which might govern our universe.
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