for challenges involving John Conway's Game of Life.
This tag indicates that the challenge involves Conway's Game of Life.
The Game of Life is a two-dimensional cellular automaton, invented by John Conway. The domain is an infinite regular square grid, in which each cell can be either dead or alive. At each step, each cell is updated as follows:
- Dead cells with 3 live neighbors come alive.
- Live cells with less than 2 or more than 3 live neighbors die.
- All other cells remain in their previous state.
The neighborhood is the Moore neighborhood which includes the 8 orthogonally and diagonally adjacent cells. Despite the simple rules, the Game of Life exhibits very complicated behaviour, and has even been shown to be Turing complete.
The resulting patterns have been studied and catalogued extensively. For further reading see LifeWiki.
When posting challenges related to the Game of Life, don't forget to specify how boundaries of the computed domain should be handled (usually the boundaries either wrap around or are considered dead).
