Trivia / Conway's Game of Life

• Approval of God: Conway approved of the close variant HighLife to the point of saying it was "really the game [he] should have found, since it's so rich in nice things."
• Fan Community Nicknames: "Lifenthusiasts".
• Follow the Leader: The Game of Life is one of a distinct class of cellular automata: to be specific, it is a 2-dimensional, 2-state, orthogonal, outer-totalistic cellular automaton that obeys the B3/S23 rule within a Moore neighborhood. The "B3/S23" is the important part, as that's the encoding of the birth/survival rules that give Life its uniquely dynamic properties. However, there are a vast number of other rules that can also be used, and many of these have been explored too. In honor of the Game of Life, they are referred to as "Life-likes".
• Inspiration for the Work: Early experiments with cellular automata models by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann starting in the 1940s, with the goal of studying things such as crystal growth, self-replication, and liquid motion.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: John Conway never liked the fact that the Game of Life was prioritized over his other work.
• Newbie Boom: Whereas much Life research in the 1990s and 2000s was conducted on the invite-only LifeCA mailing list (and, to a lesser extent, the comp.theory.cell-automata newsgroup on Usenet), the founding of the ConwayLife forums in 2009 and the Conwaylife Lounge Discord server in 2017 have brought an influx of new, mostly younger, users to the world of cellular automata.
• Referenced by...: Has its own page.
• Similarly Named Works: "The Game of Life" is also a board game by Milton Bradley.

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