The Immigration Game

Angol leírás

The Immigration game is an adaptation of John Conway's abstract zero-player game of Life to a two-player game. It was first described in Lifeline, a newsletter dedicated to Conway's Life, in 1971.

In the Immigration game, players setup the game by taking turns and placing 5 pieces each of their color on a 25x25 rectangular grid. Each position in the 25x25 grid can be either alive or dead, the living positions (or “cells”) are those that have a counter placed in them. Once setup is complete, the pieces are not moved and board positions evolve without player intervention according to the rules of Conway’s Game of Life, as listed below:

At each turn (or “generation”) the state of a cell is determined by the following rules:

1. If a live cell has less than two neighbors in the eight neighboring cells, it dies in the next generation (“loneliness”)

2. If a live cell has at two or three neighbors in the eight neighboring cells, it stays alive in the next generation.

3. If a live cell has more than three neighbors in the eight neighboring cells, it dies in the next generation (“overcrowding”).

4. If a dead cell has exactly three neighbors in the eight neighboring cells, it becomes alive in the next generation (“reproduction”).

New living cells, which come into being by having exactly 3 neighbors, take on the color of the majority of those three neighbors. Note that all cells in the 25 x 25 board have 8 neighbors each as the board is considered to wrap around the edges to each opposite side.

After the 10th generation, the player with the most living cells is allowed to place a counter thus adding an additional live cell of his or her color, followed by a turn by the other player. If both players have the same amount of live cells, generations continue to develop until one player has a majority, at which time the generations stop so players can place their new live cells and the process begins again.

Play continues this way until one of the players has no live cells left and the winning player is the only one with live cells on the board.