

Any ‘on’ cell (t -1) with two or three ‘on’ neighbours (t -1) remains ‘on’ at time t.Any ‘on’ cell (at time t-1) with fewer than two ‘on’ neighbours (at t -1) transitions to an ‘off’ state at time t.

The game takes place in discrete time, with the state of each cell at time t determined by its own state and the states of its eight immediate neighbours at t-1 (the Moore neighbourhood of radius 1), according to the following simple rules: In its standard format, the Game of Life unfolds on an infinite two-dimensional grid composed of cells each of which is either ‘on/alive’ or ‘off/dead’. 5 Implications: Emergence, self-organization, autopoeisis, and the physics of information.

Even though its (simple) rules are specified at the level of individual cells, one sees entities at coarse-grained ‘higher’ levels of description, whose behaviors are better described by rules at these higher levels. One reason for its appeal is that it is very simple to program, yet at the same time it appears to exemplify emergent and self-organized behaviour. First popularized in 1970 in the Scientific American (Gardner, 1970), the Game of Life has attracted lasting appeal among both scientific and amateur communities. Following specification of an initial configuration, patterns evolve over time across the grid requiring no further user input (thus ‘zero-player’). It takes place on an infinite two-dimensional grid in which cells can be ‘on’ (alive) or ‘off’ (dead), and is defined by a set of rules that jointly determine the state of a cell given the state of its neighbours. The Game of Life (sometimes known simply as Life) is an example of a cellular automaton and a zero-player game. Izhikevich, Editor-in-Chief of Scholarpedia, the peer-reviewed open-access encyclopediaĭr.
