The game was originally worked out slowly, by hand, on grid paper, blackboard or using tiles on a Go board, after being popularized in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American in October 1970, but increasing availability of computers have enormously expanded the options available (and enormously reduced the time and labour needed) to cell pattern researchers. One interacts with the Game of Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves.
![conway conway](http://jjguy.com/life/header-a.png)
The game is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state. The player is a Newtonian clockmaker god, arranging starting conditions of cell locations on the grid and then setting the system into motion to continue, untouched and unabated, as the game plays itself, evolving, and generations of cells tick along and produce kaleidoscopic patterns, flickering oscillators and stubborn, stable little clumps and lumps (or "still lifes"). The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by Dr John Conway in 1970. From step to step, their amount of adjacent neighbours (above, below, on the sides and diagonally) are measured: fewer than two or more than three, and the inhabitant of the cell will die exactly two or three and they will remain stable finally, any uninhabited square with three neighbours will spawn forth a new entity. These entities live on cells of a flat, 2D binary Cartesian grid and their life and reproduction is dictated according to a few demanding conditions. Conway’s Game of Life Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton simulation designed in 1970 by the British mathematician John Horton Conway as an illus- tration of John von Neumann’s hypothetical idea of a self-replicating machine.2 The world of the game consists of an infinite grid of two- dimensional squares. It features file operations for loading and saving Life patterns, onscreen editing capabilities like those found in graphics programs, a complete Help file, and dozens of sample patterns. Some programs conventionally considered games are simulators that have been described as "software toys", such as Little Computer People or the iterations of Will Wright's Sim franchise, concerning themselves with the life cycles of simulated entities in The Sims, it's the lives and deaths of people being simulated, while in Conway's Game of Life, it's the lives and deaths of single-celled entities (or "cellular automata"). This is a new version of Conways 'Game of Life' for Microsoft Windows.