2014-04-26 10:52:28 -04:00
|
|
|
life
|
|
|
|
|
|
2014-04-26 11:54:15 -04:00
|
|
|
n. 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first
|
|
|
|
|
introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ( Scientific American , October 1970);
|
|
|
|
|
the game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it
|
|
|
|
|
could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand.
|
|
|
|
|
Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at
|
|
|
|
|
various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game
|
|
|
|
|
(most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO !). When
|
|
|
|
|
a hacker mentions life , he is much more likely to mean this game than the
|
|
|
|
|
magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. Many web
|
|
|
|
|
resources are available starting from the Open Directory page of Life. The
|
|
|
|
|
Life Lexicon is a good indicator of what makes the game so fascinating. A
|
|
|
|
|
glider, possibly the best known of the quasi-organic phenomena in the Game
|
|
|
|
|
of Life. 2. The opposite of Usenet.
|
|
|
|
|
|
