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
The REAL significance is that, starting in the mid 70s, novice computer users (raises hand) had a program that could consume arbitrarily large amounts of compute cycles. AFAIK ( and I was there the whole time) there was nothing like it before. I spent a big chunk of my high school life messing with it on every computer I could get my paws on, culminating with an IBM 360/65 mainframe.
Edit to add: at that site, the main competition was from a fellow amateur astronomer who was simulating collisions between two galaxies. I even remember the name of his program: WELTALL. I hated that guy 😁
Later, of course, came the Mandelbrot Set, graphics, games, Reddit, etc.
But I think Conway’s Life was the first.
If you are wondering, why hasn’t anyone applied this concept to a real theory of the unvierse? Complexity arising from simplicity? Replicating patterns? Well someone of course, did: [https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/](https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-have-a-path-to-the-fundamental-theory-of-physics-and-its-beautiful/)
You can play it and explore the game in google. [Link](https://www.google.com/search?q=conway%27s+game+of+life&oq=conway%27s+G&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUqCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyCggAEAAYsQMYgAQyBggBEEUYOTIHCAIQABiABDIHCAMQABiABDIHCAQQABiABDIHCAUQABiABDIHCAYQABiABDIGCAcQRRg8qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) There is a pause and play button to the right, and you can click the background to turn on or off the pixels.
Would this work in 3D? Or a modified version of it?
It’s not truly a classic “game” by definition – there are rules, but no goal or challenge (unless you define them for yourself).
As example of computer programming, it’s fairly elegant and surprisingly simple, leads to fairly interesting/complex results and writing it is a really good coding practice, because it’s about applying logic to 2D grid / array, which is fairly common thing for beginner programmers to learn. Also, processing a set of rules every tick is what all video games do. So it landed in every programming textbook and classroom.
The “fame” is overrated, but it serves as really good example to bring up when talking about simple rules producing complex things – every area of life has some sort of element that everybody knows and makes it easy to use as an example. Other similar things in life exist – like DNA is a strand of acids, but can generate all the insane diversity of life, or Mandelbrot set is just couple mathematical formulae, but when visualized, will blow your mind. Game of Life is in such class.
Others have already explained how it demonstrates emergence quite well; I’d just like to add on that the game of life is not actually particularly important. While it does demonstrate the important concept that simple rules can lead to complex behaviors, there are plenty of other systems that also do this. Even the game’s inventor, the great John Conway, has stated in interviews that he doesn’t view the game as particularly interesting compared to the rest of his work.
It’s mostly just popular as a cultural phenomenon in the math and computer science community. It’s a fun challenge for programmers to try to implement and so they’ve made countless versions of it all over the internet.
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