John Horton Conway Simulates Life

In the most recent Quanta Magazine, a obituary of John Horton Conway, who inspired many of us  to take up his 'game of life' to simulate life-like things, called cellular automata,  in a computer.  Some of my earliest programming implemented his simulation models.


A Life in Games
John Horton Conway claims to have never worked a day in his life. This adaptation from the biography Genius at Play shows how serious advances such as the surreal numbers can spring out of fun and games. ... "

  ... " Conway’s contributions to the mathematical canon include innumerable games. He is perhaps most famous for inventing the Game of Life in the late 1960s. The Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner called it “Conway’s most famous brainchild.” This is not Life the family board game, but Life the cellular automaton. A cellular automaton is a little machine with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration in discrete rather than continuous time — in seconds, say, each tick of the clock advances the next iteration, and over time, behaving a bit like a transformer or a shape-shifter, the cells evolve into something, anything, everything else. Life is played on a grid, like tic-tac-toe, where its proliferating cells resemble skittering microorganisms viewed under a 
microscope..   ... "

A Game of life Pulsar:





The wikipedia has a good 'technical' overvew:    
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life