Conway's Game of Life on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Digital Life 04: When Does a Pattern Become a Thing?

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:26:00 +0100

Rule 30 gave us structure.

But it did not obviously give us a thing.

The pattern expanded.

It changed.

Differences propagated.

Interesting global behavior appeared.

But if I pointed at one region and asked:

Is that the same object ten generations later?

the answer was not obvious.

So let’s change systems.

Not because Conway’s Game of Life is more sophisticated.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:26:00 +0100

Once we can run Conway’s Game of Life, the next step is not to add more graphics.

It is to make the patterns themselves inspectable.

A blinker is not interesting because somebody named it.

It is interesting because it returns to the same state after two generations.

A glider is not interesting because it has a familiar shape.

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:25:00 +0100

Conway’s Game of Life is one of the cleanest examples of complex two-dimensional behavior emerging from a tiny local rule.

The world is a grid of dead and live cells.

Each cell sees its eight surrounding neighbors.

Then four ideas decide the next generation:

underpopulation
survival
overpopulation
birth

The standard rule is usually written B3/S23:

Everything else becomes or remains dead.