A Conway 'Game of Life' Conjecture Settled After 29 years
In 1992 John Conway raised a question about the patterns in his famous mathematical Game of Life: "Is there a Godlike still-life, one that can only have existed for all time (apart from things that don't interfere with it)?" Conway closed his note by adding "Well, I'm going out to get a hot dog now..."
Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo, a pair of researchers at the University of Turku in Finland, have found a finite configuration in Conway's Game of Life such that, if it occurs within a universe at time T, it must have existed in that same position at time T-1 (and therefore, by induction, at time 0)... The configuration was discovered by experimenting with finite patches of repeating 'agar' and using a SAT solver to check whether any of them possess this property.
Other Game of Life-related news:
- David Raucci discovered the first oscillator of period 38. Remaining unsolved periods are 19, 34, and 41.
- Darren Li has connected Charity Engine to Catagolue, providing approximately 2000 CPU cores of continuous effort and searching slightly more than 10^12 random initial configurations per day.
- Nathaniel Johnston and Dave Greene have published a book on Conway's Game of Life, featuring both the theoretical aspects & engineering that's been accomplished in the half-century since its conception.