Description
Book SynopsisIn the late 1960s British mathematician John Conway invented a virtual mathematical machine that operates on a two-dimensional array of square cell. A dead cell comes to life if it has exactly three live neighbours. A live cell remains alive if two or three of its neighbours are alive, otherwise the cell dies.
Trade ReviewFrom the reviews:
“This volume’s 27 papers offer some systematic methods and rigorous theorems that exhibit the study of Conway’s game and its variations, emerging out of the realm of merely recreational mathematics. … this unique book will have great value as both a state-of-the-art summary and a collection of proposals for new directions to explore. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.” (D. V. Feldman, Choice, Vol. 48 (4), December, 2010)
“Andrew Adamatzky has assembled a superb collection of papers on Life that encompass work going back more than 20 years. … maintains a good balance between interconnectedness and recognition of the papers as independent contributions. … This book is a treasure trove of history, concepts, and models. It is a good starting place for a newcomer to the study of Conway’s Game of Life, an opening of vistas for the amateur hobbyist, and a serious handbook for the professional researcher.” (Anthony J. Duben, ACM Computing Reviews, February, 2011)
Table of Contents1. Introduction to Cellular Automata and Conway’s Game of Life.- Part I Historical.- 2. Conway’s Game of Life: Early Personal Recollections.- 3. Conway’s Life.- 4. Life’s Still Lifes.- 5. A Zoo of Life Forms.- Part II Classical Topics.- 6. Growth and Decay in Life-Like Cellular Automata.- 7. The B36/S125 “2x2” Life-Like Cellular Automaton.- 8. Object Synthesis in Conway’s Game of Life and other Cellular Automata.- 9. Gliders and Glider Guns Discovery in Cellular Automata.- 10. Constraint Programming to Solve Maximal Density Still Life.- Part III Asynchronous, Continuous and Memory-Enriched Automata.- 11. Larger than Life’s Extremes: Rigorous Results for Simplified Rules and Speculation on the Phase Boundaries.- 12. RealLife.- 13. Variations on the Game of Life.- 14. Does Life Resist Asynchrony?.- 15. LIFE with Short-Term Memory.- 16. Localization Dynamics in a Binary Two-Dimensional Cellular Automaton: the Diffusion Rule.- Part IV Non-Orthogonal Lattices.- 17. The Game of Life in Non-Square Environments.- 18. The Game of Life Rules on Penrose Tilings: Still Life and Oscillators.- 19. A Spherical XOR Gate Implemented in the Game of Life.- Part V Complexity.- 20. Emergent Complexity in Conway’s Game of Life.- 21. Macroscopic Spatial Complexity of the Game of Life Cellular Automaton: A Simple Data Analysis.- Part VI Physics.- 22. The Enlightened Game of Life 23. Towards a Quantum Game of Life.- Part VII Music.- 24. Game of Life Music.- Part VIII Computation.- 25. Universal Computation and Construction in GoL Cellular Automata.- 26. A Simple Universal Turing Machine for the Game of Life Turing Machine.- 27. Computation with Competing Patterns in Life-like Automaton.- Index
