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Asked: 2026-05-10T23:27:55+00:00

I was recently reading about artificial life and came across the statement, Conway’s Game

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I was recently reading about artificial life and came across the statement, ‘Conway’s Game of Life demonstrates enough complexity to be classified as a universal machine.’ I only had a rough understanding of what a universal machine is, and Wikipedia only brought me as close to understanding as Wikipedia ever does. I wonder if anyone could shed some light on this very sexy statement?

Conway’s Game of Life seems, to me, to be a lovely distraction with some tremendous implications: I can’t make the leap between that and calculator? Is that even the leap that I should be making?

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  1. You can build a Turing machine out of Conway’s life – although it would be pretty horrendous.

    The key is in gliders (and related patterns) – these move (slowly) along the playing field, so can represent streams of bits (the presence of a glider for a 1 and the absence for a 0). Other patterns can be built to take in two streams of gliders (at right angles) and emit another stream of bits corresponding to the AND/OR/etc of the original two streams.

    EDIT: There’s more on this on the LogiCell web site.

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