The Adder

Month: October 2022

  • That’s Life 3: The Three Types of Things

    That’s Life 3: The Three Types of Things

    This is part 3 of a series of posts about Conway’s Game of Life; the other two can be found here and here, and here’s a supplemental post about how to play Life on a computer. I’ll start with a confession: the title of this post is sort of a lie—there are more types of…

  • Life Software

    See also: Life and Life 2 I promised a post on how you can play Life (what’s Life? See the previous posts), so here it is! If you want to play Life on the web, and you don’t want to download anything, you want to use LifeViewer (https://lazyslug.com/lifeviewer/). The one quirk I’ve noticed about it…

  • That’s Life 2: The Glider

    That’s Life 2: The Glider

    If you’ll recall, we left off from part one with John Conway sitting amazed at the “glider” that moves across the Life universe. Here it is again: Isn’t that cool? It’s cool. Want to know why? Because life is cool. Also, because Life is cool. I should note that the “R-pentomino” from the last post…

  • That’s Life

    That’s Life

    This is Conway’s Game of Life. What is this? It’s a cellular automaton: an infinite grid of squares, called “cells”, hence the name. The cells change color based on their neighbors’ colors. This is one of those math things that seem useless at first, but become intruiging, until after a decade of looking at it…