Conway's Game of Life

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Prepare to embark on a journey of cellular automata, where each cell's state is determined by its neighbors. Welcome to the world of Conway's Game of Life, a fascinating simulation that manifests complex patterns from simple rules. Fasten your seatbelts, we are about to dive deep into this mesmerizing microcosmos.

Rules of the Game

Conway's Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway. It's played out on a grid, with each cell either alive or dead. The state of a cell in the next generation is determined by the following rules:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

These rules give rise to an astonishing array of patterns, some of which have intriguing properties such as self-replication.

Implementing Life in Python

Now let's breathe life into these rules by creating a Python implementation. In our version, we'll represent the game grid as a two-dimensional list, with 0s for dead cells and 1s for live ones. Here's how you might set up the initial state:

grid = [[0, 1, 0],
        [0, 1, 0],
        [0, 1, 0]]

This configuration is known as a "beacon", one of the many named patterns in the Game of Life. It oscillates between two states over the course of two generations.

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