TrueLife – Evolving the Game of Life

Abstract

John Conway’s Game of Life, published in Scientific American in 1970 is an attempt to model the behavior of life using a 2D cellular automaton. Although a breakthrough discovery for cellular automata and emergence theory, the game is restricted and incomplete due to its static, simplified rules. We will show that the game does not model life accurately and propose an alternative: TrueLife. TrueLife is a non­ deterministic, non­local, evolving Game of Life variant that we believe is more complete than Life for several key reasons. TrueLife is unique since at each generation a rule is chosen randomly from a list and applied to the current state. This allows the game to be inherently non­deterministic since it is impossible to know which rule is being applied at a given iteration. TrueLife will also be a learning simulation where rules that produce better results will be applied more frequently. Another unique aspect of TrueLife is the motivation behind the rules. The original Life rules are Darwinian and selfish acting only on local inputs that lead to local outputs. TrueLife’s rules will be non­local and act globally across the entire grid. TrueLife’s rules were formalized by drawing on much broader areas of science such as ecology, psychology and quantum theory. We are currently in the process of finding a model system to which TrueLife would be best suited.