Conway's Game of Life in MATLAB
GameOfLife I'm fairly sure the first place I heard about Conway's Game of Life was the Numberphile video with John Conway himself talking about his cellular automaton. For some background, Life uses a grid of cells that are in one of two states, live or dead, and applies a simple set of rules to this grid to determine which cells are live in the next generation. Conway's intention was to develop a simple set of rules that allowed complex behaviours to emerge over time. Conway came up with four rules [ 1 ]: Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies (referred to as underpopulation or exposure ). Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies (referred to as overpopulation or overcrowding ). Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours will come to life. While Conway initially modelled this by hand, the simple boolean s...