Conway's Game of Life

Location: Mathematics / Cellular Automata / Conway's Game of Life

Summary

In it's basic form the Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automation on an infinite square 2D grid. Every cell from the grid can be either "alive" (full, set, value 1) or "dead" (empty, unset, value 0). The state of the grid evolves through a discreet process of iterations from a predefined initial configuration of "live" cells either to infinity, or until a non-changing grid state occurs (which also includes an empty grid). On each iteration step, a set of predefined rules is applied on the current state, producing a new state (a new configuration). The rules are: a "dead" cell becomes "alive", if it has exactly 3 neighbouring "live" cells; a "live" cell stays "alive", if it has 2 or 3 neighbouring "live" cells; a "live" cell becomes "dead", if it has either less than 2, or more than 3 neighbouring "live" cells.

There is a lot of information on the subject out there. If you are new to the subject, you might want to check the Wikipedia article.

Beyond common knowledge, this article is intended to provide you with:

a sample JavaScript implementation of the Conway's Game of Life;
an overview of some of the more interesting extensions and generalizations of the Conway's Game of Life;
a list of some possible practical experiments, like using the Conway's Game of Life for image processing and recognition;
a detailed exploration of one yet unexplored generalization - Conway's Game of Life with fuzzy rules - also part of the JavaScript implementation.

Status

This article is under development. Many important informations are still missing.

Conway's Game of Life Extensions and Generalizations

Fuzzy Cell States

JsFiddle

yet to come; the code is on my hdd; need to put it also there

Source Code

yet to come; the code is on my hdd; need to put it also here

How it works

yet to come; when the code comes

Resources

The following resources must be filtered; some of them will be left as sources

YouTube

This video is related to a future experiment: Search for such fuzzy rules which cause the generations to follow the predictions of the population model, described below. Also looking for a possible link to the Mandelbrot Set.