Note: This page is, for the most part, unoriginal. The original can be found at: http://www.tech.org/~stuart/life/rules.html

John Conway's Game of Life

The Rules

The Game of Life was invented by John Conway (as you might have gathered). The game is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these:

Death	If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1 neighbors: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding).
Survival	If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation.
Birth	If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.

Where You Can Find More

The original article describing the game can be found in the April 1970 issue of Scientific American, page 120.

C language implementation of the algorithm as a solution to a homework problem. Formerly found at http://babbage.sosu.edu/cs/courses/cs2123/solutions/chap5-18.txt.

Java implementation of the game. Much cooler than mine.

Another Java implementation of the game. Also much cooler than mine.

If you go to a search engine like AltaVista and issue a query such as john conway game life scientific american, you should find lots of stuff (including the three references above).