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