John H. Conway has passed away, his contributions to math are too numerous for me to list in this post. What I wanted to explore in this post is one of his “recreational math” contributions: The Game of Life.
If you haven’t heard, It’s this zero player computer “game”: Not this multi-player board game: I scare-quoted game because there are no actual players. It is an example of a cellular automaton, which is a simple program that evolves over time according to a fixed, simple set of rules.