Conway’s game of life in APL

This book provides an introduction to Conway’s Game of Life, the interesting mathematics behind it, and the methods used to construct many of its most interesting patterns. Lots of small “building block”-style patterns (especially in the first four or so chapters of this book) were found via brute-force or other computer searches, and the book does not go into the details of how these searches were implemented. However, from that point on it tries to guide the reader through the thought processes and ideas that are needed to combine those patterns into more interesting composite ones.

While caring for her, preparing for her death, and handling logistics afterwards, I learned a lot from online resources, various professionals, and friends. So I’m trying to pass on some things I learned by sharing them in this blog post.

This version of John Conway’s cellular automaton takes a boolean matrix argumentrepresenting a population of “creatures” and returns a boolean matrix of thesucceeding generation. Each cell in the matrix may be occupied by a creature(1) or be empty (0).

A pretty slick javascript implementation of Conway’s life:

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” “unpopulated”. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent.