- Cellular Automation, devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.
- Zero-player game
- Universe is an infinite two-dimensional grid, each of which has two states, alive or dead.
- Each cell is surrounded by eight neighbours
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives to the next generation.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
- Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
- Many different types of patterns occur in the Game of Life, which are classified according to their behaviour. Common patterns are:
- Still lifes
- do not change from one generation to next.
- Oscilators
- return to their initial state after a finite number of generations.
- Spaceships
- translate themselves across the grid.