# Questions about Conway's 'Life'

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [April 12, 2004, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690 "2004-04-12T23:44:15Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![SmackFu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/53a042/32.png) [@SmackFu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmackFu)\
**Post date:** [April 13, 2004, 5:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690/21 "2004-04-13T17:15:37Z")

</div>

Many of Martin Gardner’s old books have chapters on Life and describe interesting patterns. Definitely worth a read. They tend to have pretty good library presence which is convenient.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Walton\_Firm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/45deac/32.png) [@Walton\_Firm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Walton_Firm)\
**Post date:** [April 13, 2004, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690/22 "2004-04-13T17:53:56Z")

</div>

It is in fact possible to build a Turing-complete computer on top of Life. Surprisingly enough, Linux has not yet been ported to it. 😛

[http://rendell.server.org.uk/gol/tm.htm](http://rendell.server.org.uk/gol/tm.htm)

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\
**Post date:** [April 13, 2004, 6:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690/23 "2004-04-13T18:02:07Z")

</div>

> [@](#):
>
> Almost. The second picture on the link I posted is the “nine-bit” spaceship – your picture plus an extra dot in the upper-right (in yours) corner.  
> Some days I feel totally invisible, you know?

Yeah, I knew that I was missing some isolated pixels, but the one I posted quickly evolves into the full spaceship. And as you might imagine, it took me a bit of time to construct that post. When I started, yours wasn’t there. Thank you for the wonderful page; I’m going to have to try some of those patterns myself.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/questions-about-conways-life/239690.md?page=1)