Excursions into Logic Based Computation using Conway

1
Excursions into Logic Based Computationusing
Conways Game of LifeLiban Mohamed

• Introduction
• Conways Game of Life is a set of rules in a
  two dimensional cellular automata grid.
  Specifically, the Game of Life allows cells to
  have two states and provides them with eight
  neighbors. The rules state that between one
  generation and the next, live cells with two or
  three live neighbors live on, and dead cells with
  exactly three live neighbors come to life. This
  rule set was specifically chosen by John Conway
  for the ability to create stable patterns as well
  as the difficulty of creating patterns which grow
  infinitely. This difficulty was rather quickly
  overcome by Bill Gospers glider gun, which
  opened up the ability to create computational
  devices such as logic gates.
• Abstract
• This project endeavors to take advantage of the
  fact that logic constructions can be created in
  the Game of Life to create a calculator based in
  the Game of Life. That is, the purpose of this
  project is to create one or more patterns in the
  game of life which take an input in the game of
  life and consistently produce an output which can
  be interpreted to get the right answer.
• Procedures
• The procedure followed in this project was to
  research algorithms that represented each of the
  functions that are carried out in the calculator
  and then create a pattern that would replicate
  them in the Game of Life given a certain input.
  This becomes progressively more difficult with
  higher functions, such as exponentiation.
• Conclusions
• Conclusions forthcoming