A long-standing mystery about repeating patterns in a two-dimensional mathematical game has been solved after more than 50 years with the discovery of two final pieces in the puzzle. The result is ...

In cellular automata, simple rules create elaborate structures. Now researchers can start with the structures and reverse-engineer the rules. Alexander Mordvintsev showed me two clumps of pixels on ...

Conway’s Game of Life excels in its simplicity, creating a cellular automaton on a 2D grid where each cell obeys a set of very simple rules that determine whether a cell is ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. After ...