The Game of Life

"Life" is a form of cellular automaton. It consists of a grid of spaces on which individual cells live or die according to certain rules. Although the rules appear quite simple, the results of following them can be fascinatingly complex.

"Life" was invented by John Horton Conway, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge. It was popularized by Martin Gardner who wrote a number of columns about it in Scientific American. Gardner also describes it in considerable detail in his book "Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements" (W. H. Freeman & Co., 1983).

This particular Life program runs under Windows 3.1 (or later) on PC- type machines. The only requirement over and above standard Windows is a mouse.

The program may come as either a 49k ZIP file or a self-extracting 64k EXE file. Create a new directory, move (or copy) the file into it, and unzip it. The ZIP file requires the program PKUNZIP to unzip. The EXE file will unzip itself when you run it.

One of the resulting files will be README.TXT which will contain detailed instructions. Look at it with an editor such as Notepad for further information.

The program does not modify WIN.INI or CONFIG.SYS or AUTOEXEC.BAT.


About the Author

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This page was created by Tom Digby and is copyrighted with a fairly liberal "fair use" policy.

Email = bubbles@well.sf.ca.us

Home Page = http://www.well.com/user/bubbles/