#THE GAME OF LIFE COMPUTER GAME SERIES#

So far, everything I’ve said is mathematically proven. Here’s another big leap: can a pattern in the Game of Life experience consciousness? If you put the right symbols on its tape, it can play chess, it can forecast the weather, it can translate German to Chinese. This is a Turing machine, and it can compute anything that can be computed. All its power comes from how the squares are arranged at the beginning after that, the three rules determine how the machine behaves. Every square in this machine is following the three rules of survival, death, and birth. When the video zooms in, you can see that the machine is made of the basic patterns we saw before: still lifes, oscillators, and gliders. The long diagonal line is the tape, and the rectangle in the middle is the part that transitions between modes, and moves back and forth along the tape. It’s enormous, covering millions of squares. This pattern is a Turing machine, constructed in the Game of Life. This is a useful fact because we can compare any system (such as real computer) to Turing’s machine to see if they are equivalently capable.Ĭan the Game of Life compute anything a Turing machine can? Yes it can. For any reasonable definition you can think of, Turing’s claim is true.

#THE GAME OF LIFE COMPUTER GAME SERIES#

The term “computable” is unfortunately vague, but it means something like “a series of actions, following precise rules”. There’s been a century of intense research into this claim. Turing described his machine and claimed that anything which can be computed, could be computed by this simple machine. In fact, Turing never built one, the video above shows a hobbyist’s interpretation. The machine is so simple, you can prove theorems about it. (The tape is like its hard drive.) Additionally, the machine has a fixed number of modes (known as “states” in computer science), and it can transition from one mode to one other mode each time it reads a symbol from its tape. It can read, write, or alter one symbol at a time on any position on the tape. It has an infinitely long tape, which it can move forward or backward. In a 1936 paper, Alan Turing described an imaginary machine. The question everyone’s researching is, given how simple the game is, what can it do? What can Game of Life patterns do?Ĭan a pattern in the Game of Life do nothing? Soon some computer scientists made programs that can run large games fast, eventually simulating boards with billions of squares, playing thousands of steps per second. When Conway was first playing with the Game of Life, he did it by hand, trying configurations on a board for the game of Go. One day when he was lecturing on symmetry and the Platonic solids, he brought in a turnip as a prop, carved it one slice at a time into an icosahedron, with its 20 triangular faces, eating the scraps as he went. Conway gained a reputation for his high jinks (not to mention his disheveled appearance). Hired at Cambridge as an assistant lecturer, Dr. He could be easily distracted by what he called “nerdish delights.” He once built a water-powered computer, which he called Winnie (Water Initiated Nonchalantly Numerical Integrating Engine). Conway cultivated his acknowledged lifelong preference for being lazy, playing games and doing no work. The Times said his work “ranged from the rigorously highbrow to the frivolously fun, earning him prizes and a reputation as a creative, iconoclastic and even magical genius”.Īs a student, Dr. He was born in England in 1937 and spent most of his career at the University of Cambridge, and then at Princeton. I read his obituary in the New York Times, and learned what a delightful person he was. I studied some of his work in college, but hadn’t thought about him much until he died last year. John Conway’s not a computer scientist, but he’s well-known among programmers like me for the Game of Life and similar math research that veers into computer science. (It’s not the heteronormative board game where you play a family trying to fill its car with children.) Conway’s idea came from decades of mathematicians exploring the question, can simple systems produce complex behavior? Could a system with a few basic rules behave unpredictably? Could it produce self-replicating organisms? It’s not intended to be a realistic description of biology, it’s a mathematical game, which Conway called “the Game of Life”.

John ConwayĪ mathematician named John Conway came up with these three rules around 1970. In the next step of the simulation it will be black. The empty white square in the center will spring to life.

The game of life computer game