Life

Abstract

This chapter examines Conway’s cellular automaton Life in an endeavour to assess whether the simple rules governing its operation shed light on behaviours that help us understand biological complexity. For example, it is clear that those rules can imply phenomena of cooperation and competition that determine—at any given moment—the likelihood that an individual cell will live on in the next generation, or die out. But complex structures also emerge from the objects that comprise the initial game-board, which self-perpetuate within the bounds of the game. Although the game is deterministic, the exploratory universe is as vast as one may wish.