Game of Life

The Game of Life is not for everyone. In fact, it is not for anyone. The Game of Life is actually a zero player game that was devised in the early seventies by a British mathematician named John Horton Conway. As opposed to being an actual game, the Game of Life is considered a cellular automaton. The goal is to watch how a particular string of cells evolves according to a set of given rules, thus it requires no input from people and is not a real game.

The “play” works as follows. The game grid is set up like a simple graph with coloured blocks as the playing field. A coloured square represents a single cell, and can have up to eight neighbouring cells, one on each side, one above, one below and the four diagonal corners. Number of neighbouring cells determines how a chain of cells will evolve. The rules are simple:
1. A cell with only a single neighbour or with no living neighbours dies of loneliness. To survive, a cell must have more than two living neighbours.
2. A cell with four or more living neighbours becomes crowded out and will die.
3. A cell with two or three living neighbours will flourish and move on to the next generation.
4. A dead cell (an unhighlighted or empty cell) with exactly three neighbours will come back to life.
The game may last for hundreds of generations, depending on the initial random seeding of the living cells. The entire game is watching the progression of the cellular chain to see how it changes or evolves. Some chains can literally live forever, whereas others are very short lived.
The only actual flaw of the cellular automaton is the life and death sequence, which is simultaneous. In other words, there are no outside factors changing the timing of a birth or death. The survival of a cell depends on its neighbours and its birth or death happens at the same time as all other births or deaths in the cellular chain. This is a very pure form of generation creation, and is never seen in real life.
This game is interesting if you are a scientist or mathematician, and spawned a great deal of research in the area of cellular automation. Many people found it interesting to study the complex patterns that life will follow. A pure gamer, however, will probably be instantly bored by this game, since there is nothing for a person to do but sit and watch. It might make a good screen saver. However, if you are one of those few people who can sit and watch your computer defrag for an hour, this is perfect. The little coloured pixels are the same and so is the action level.