No, not that ripoff board game.
It is the
Game Of Life, a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. You might find this interesting/familiar...
It is a no-player game... that is, everything is done by the computer, and humans observe the behavior of the pixels (called "cells").
The rules are simple and elegant:
[*]Any live cell with fewer than two neighbours dies of loneliness.
[*]Any live cell with more than three neighbours dies of crowding.
[*]Any dead cell with exactly three neighbours comes to life.
[*]Any live cell with two or three neighbours lives, unchanged, to the next generation.
Births and deaths occur simultaneously. Together they constitute a single generation or "tick" in the complete "life history" of the initial configuration.
There are all sorts of different patterns that occur in the Game of Life, including static patterns ("still lifes"), repeating patterns ("oscillators" - a superset of still lifes), and patterns that translate themselves across the board ("spaceships"). The simplest examples of these three classes are shown below, with live cells shown in black, and dead cells shown in white.
Still Life -- Block
Oscillators -- Blinker
Oscillators -- Toad
Spaceships -- glider
Spaceships -- LWSS (light weight spaceship)