Arachnia introduced us to the Game of Life, which she had implemented in Processing for an art installation. Afterwards, we tried out various patterns on our touch screen, to see how they evolve. Of particular joy was the evolution of the QR code pointing to our lights.
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. The “game” is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, alive or dead, or “populated” or “unpopulated”. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur.
