Gosper

In 1970, a mathematician named John Conway wrote three rules on a board: a cell with fewer than two neighbours dies of loneliness, one with more than three dies of crowding, and in an empty space with exactly three neighbours, a new cell is born. That is all. There are no other rules. And out of those three sentences come ships that cross the screen, guns that fire forever, clocks that beat in exact time, and structures that copy themselves. Nobody programmed them: they were in the rules all along. Gosper is a place to watch it happen. WHAT YOU CAN DO • Draw with your finger and press play. Zoom in, zoom out, change the speed, step one generation at a time. • Drop machines from the library: forty historical patterns, each with who discovered it, in what year, and what it does. Nothing invented — every one is checked by a test that verifies its period. • Change the rules. Besides…