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I was only in high school then, but like many people, I was blown away by Martin Gardner's famous Scientific American columns on John H. Conway's Game of Life. The first article appeared in October 1970. People still write about Life; for a tiny sample see here and here. Also check out the delightful primordial soup kitchen for more on cellular automata.

Robert T. Wainwright published a wonderful newsletter on Life called LIFELINE for several years in the early 1970s. The first issue is reproduced on his LIFEPAGE website. My work on 3-4 Life (current terminology S34/B34) appeared in issue 9, March 1973 on pages 7-8. Below are reproduced the cover page and pages 7-8. Thanks again Robert!

Rule S34/B34 is a Life-like Rule that "was initially thought to be a stable alternative to Life, until computer simulation found that larger patterns tend to explode. Has many small oscillators and spaceships."

S34/B34 means that a cell currently in the ON (live) state survives--remains ON in the next generation--if it has 3 or 4 live neighbors; a cell currently OFF becomes ON in the next generation--is born--if it has 3 or 4 neighbors. Standard Life is S23/B3. Both use Moore neighborhoods--the 8 cells surrounding the center in a rectangular grid--with cells in either of two states, ON or OFF.

I don't know if the ultimate fate of long-lived (Methuselah) pattern M#1 (see pg 7 of LIFELINE #9 above) has been determined, but I recently ran it on the wonderful Game of Life (and variant) simulator Golly. Look here to see the amazing results.

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