Description

THE GAME OF LIFE
The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellularautomaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conwayin 1970.
The "game" is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution isdetermined by its initial state, requiring no further input. Oneinteracts with the Game of Life by creating an initialconfiguration and observing how it evolves.

THE RULES
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensionalorthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of twopossible states, alive or dead. Every cell interacts with its eightneighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically,or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the followingtransitions occur:
* Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as ifcaused by under-population.
* Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to thenext generation.
* Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if byovercrowding.
* Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a livecell, as if by reproduction.
The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The firstgeneration is created by applying the above rules simultaneously toevery cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, andthe discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called atick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of thepreceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly tocreate further generations.

(Descriptions and rules are from en.wikipedia.org)