{"id":7254,"date":"2015-02-05T10:53:54","date_gmt":"2015-02-05T09:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=7254"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:45:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:45:11","slug":"the-game-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2015\/02\/05\/the-game-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"The Game of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

As I have written about before<\/a>, I have always been interested in numbers and mathematics. Although my formal studies of the subject have not gone beyond the courses that I needed to attend for a science degree, my fascination with the beauty of mathematics and numbers has been life long. I have found, on a number of occasions, that I encounter a simple idea or set of rules, then find that, years later, it is still easy to bring to mind. This is a contrast to my memory for many everyday things – names, phone numbers, dates … – where is am very forgetful.<\/p>\n

I clearly recall a visit from a friend one evening in the late 1970s …<\/p>\n

I was a student at university and my friend was aware of my interest in puzzles and mathematical oddities and shared that interest himself. So he brought along a magazine article about a “game” that he had not previously encountered. The game was simply called “Life”. I would later learn that its full name: Conway’s Game of Life. It is named after its inventor, John Conway, who had come up with the idea about a decade before I heard about it.<\/p>\n

Like so many fascinating things, the idea of the game is incredibly simple. The game takes place in a notionally infinite square matrix of cells. At any one time, a cell is either alive or dead, so there is a clear pattern of live cells. The game takes place as a sequence of cycles, when some specific rules are applied to all the cells simultaneously, which determine their state after the cycle. These rules appertain to the 8 immediate neighbors of each cell:<\/p>\n