game-of-life game sourced
Conway's Game of Life
A zero-player cellular automaton on an infinite square grid in which each cell lives or dies by the B3/S23 neighbor-count rule, producing gliders, oscillators, and universal computation from a seeded pattern.
core loop
place live cells on the grid -> apply birth on 3 and survival on 2 or 3 neighbors to every cell at once -> pattern stabilizes, oscillates, dies, or emits gliders -> observe -> edit the seed and rerun
design notes
Conway's rule is the minimal case of emergence from local update: each cell's next state depends only on how many of its eight neighbors are alive, all cells update simultaneously, and the only input is the initial pattern. The rule is Turing complete, so whether an arbitrary pattern stops changing is undecidable, and decades of discovery (Gosper's period-30 glider gun of November 1970, the R-pentomino's 1,103-generation run) came from players searching seeds. Simulators such as Golly add Hashlife for large time jumps and scripting for rule variants. The rule itself is not yet a mechanic in the taxonomy (proposal cellular-automaton-rule), so the decomposition records seeding, stepping, and run speed.
relations
3 stored edgesBuilding placement
The player's only act is toggling cells on the grid to set the seed before running generations.
Turn structure
Each generation is a discrete synchronous update the player can step through one at a time.
Pause and speed control
Computer implementations step one generation at a time or run continuously; later simulators such as Golly use Hashlife to jump far ahead in time.