In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...

John Conway’s Game of Life, a famous cellular automaton, has been found to have periodic patterns of every possible length. In 1969, the British mathematician John Conway devised a beguilingly simple ...

Back in 1970, the mathematician John Conway created a game with no players that evolves entirely from its initial state. The game is set in a kind of computational universe called a cellular automaton ...

Conway’s Game of Life is a beautiful example of how complex behavior can emerge from a few very simple rules. But while it uses biological terminology such as “cells”, “alive” and “generation”, the ...

James is a published author with multiple pop-history and science books to his name. He specializes in history, space, strange science, and anything out of the ordinary.View full profile James is a ...