Release 29, 2018 July 2
Multipage HTML version
INTRODUCTION
This is a lexicon of terms relating to John Horton Conway's Game of Life.It is also available in a single-page HTML version and an ASCII version.This lexicon was originally compiled between 1997 and 2006 byStephen A. Silver, and was updated in 2016-18 by Dave Greene and David Bell.See below for additional credits.
The latest versions of this lexicon (both HTML and ASCII)should be available from theLife Lexicon Home Page.
CREDITS
The largest single source for the early versions of this lexicon was a glossary compiled by Alan Hensel"with indispensable help from John Conway, Dean Hickerson, David Bell, Bill Gosper,Bob Wainwright, Noam Elkies, Nathan Thompson, Harold McIntosh, and Dan Hoey".Other sources include the works listed in the bibliography at theend of this lexicon, as well as pattern collections byAlan HenselandDavid Bell(and especially Dean Hickerson's file stamp.l in the latter collection),and the web sites ofMark Niemiec,Paul Callahan,Achim Flammenkamp,Robert WainwrightandHeinrich Koenig.Recent releases also use a lot of information from Dean Hickerson'sheader to his 1995stamp file. Most of the information on recent results is from the discoverersthemselves, or from Nathaniel Johnston's excellent resources athttp://www.conwaylife.com, including both the LifeWiki and thediscussion forums.
The following people all provided useful comments on earlier releasesof this lexicon: David Bell, Nicolay Beluchenko, Johan Bontes, DanielCollazo, Scot Ellison, Nick Gotts, Ivan Fomichev, Dave Greene, AlanHensel, Dean Hickerson, Dieter Leithner, Mark Niemiec, Gabriel Nivasch,Andrzej Okrasinski, Arie Paap, Peter Rott, Chris Rowett, Tony Smith,Ken Takusagawa, Andrew Trevorrow, Malcolm Tyrrell, and theconwaylife.com forum users with the handles 'thunk' and 'Apple Bottom'.
The format, errors, use of British English and anything else youmight want to complain about are by Stephen Silver -- except that forpost-Version 25 definitions, everything besides the British Englishmay well be Dave Greene's fault instead.
COPYING
This lexicon is copyright (C) Stephen Silver, 1997-2018. It may befreely copied, modified and distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence (CC BY-SA 3.0),as long as due credit is given. This includes not just credit to thosewho have contributed in some way to the present version (see above),but also credit to those who have made any modifications.LEXICOGRAPHIC ORDER
I have adopted the following convention: all characters (including spaces)other than letters and digits are ignored for the purposes of ordering theentries in this lexicon.(Many terms are used by some people as a single word,with or without a hyphen, and by others as two words.My convention means that I do not have to list these in two separate places.Indeed, I list them only once, choosing whichever form seems most common or sensible.)Digits lexicographically precede letters.FORMAT
The diagrams in this lexicon are in a very standard format.You should be able to simply copy a pattern, paste it intoa new file and run it in your favourite Life program.If you use Gollythen you can just paste the pattern directly into the program.Diagrams are generally restricted to size 64×64 or less.Most definitions that have a diagram have also some data in bracketsafter the keyword.Oscillators are marked as pn (where n is a positive integer),meaning that the period is n (p1 indicates a still life).Wicks are marked in the same way but with the word "wick" added.For spaceships the speed (as a fraction of c, the speed of light),the direction and the period are given.Fuses are marked with speed and period and have the word "fuse" added.Wicks and fuses are infinite in extent and so have necessarily beentruncated, with the ends stabilized wherever practical.
SCOPE
This lexicon covers only Conway's Life,and provides no information about other cellular automata.David Bell has written articles on two other interesting cellular automata:HighLife (which is similar to Life, but has a tiny replicator) andDay & Night (which is very different, but exhibits many of the same phenomena).These articles can be found onhis website.ERRORS AND OMISSIONS
If you find any errors (including typos) or serious omissions, then pleaseemail b3s23life
gmail.com with the details.As of June 2018 this email address is monitored by Dave Greene.