Conway's Life
This is a very brief, telegraphic description; for a longer description, you might want to look here.
Conway's Life game is a cellular automaton.
It consists of a number of "cells" arranged in a rectangular grid. It mimics
biological life in certain respects. Each cell is either alive or dead
on each time step. The state of each cell on the next time step is determined
according to the following rule:
if (alive && (numberLiveNbrs == 3 || numberLiveNbrs == 2))
stays alive
else if (dead && numberLiveNbrs == 3)
becomes alive
else is dead
The neighbors of a cell are the 8 cells that surround
it. I.e. the cell 'X' has the eight neighbors labelled 'N'.
Thus, using * for alive and - for dead:
has neighbor counts
and becomes