Does life resist asynchrony?

Abstract

Undoubtedly, Conway's Game of Life - or simply Life - is one of the most amazing inventions in the field of cellular automata. Forty years after its discovery, the model still fascinates researchers as if it were an inexhaustible source of puzzles. One of the most intriguing questions is to determine what makes this rule so particular among the quasi-infinite set of rules one can search. In this chapter we analyse how the Game of Life is affected by the presence of two structural pertubations: a change in the synchrony of the updates and a modification of the links between the cells. © 2010 Springer-Verlag London Limited.