About a year ago, I fascinated over a computer simulation called Conway’s Game of Life. This simulation consisted of a two-dimensional grid. Its cells could be filled or empty, which corresponded to alive and dead, respectively. This grid followed four simple rules: any live cells with fewer than two live neighbors dies, any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives to the next generation, any live cell with more than three neighbors dies, and any dead cell with exactly three neighbors becomes a live cell. Filling in the grid, the player could create patterns with different properties. What I found fascinating was not the game itself, but the properties the game exhibited.

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• Mathematics