[lotharbot]

"Conway's Game Of Life" is a game of cells on a 2d grid that live/die/reproduce based on how many neighbors they have.

As a result of the game rules, you can get simple behaviors like "everything dies" or "everything is stable". But you can also get more complex behaviors, like things growing for thousands of turns before eventually collapsing and then stabilizing into a few fragments here and there. And you can get behaviors that don't stabilize -- like shapes that evolve in a way that after a certain number of turns the whole shape has moved along the grid ("gliders" or "spaceships") or oscillators of various periods.

Quite a while back there was a loop discovered that allowed for a period 43 oscillator, which could be adjusted by just moving things farther apart and therefore allowed every period of 43 or more. And oscillators of most smaller periods had been discovered -- but 19 and 41 were still unknown, up until both were discovered in rapid succession by 2 different people. So now we know how to make an oscillator for any given period within Conway's Game of Life.

[omginternets]

And why does that matter? What do we now know as a result? Or what interesting properties follow?

[beacon294]

It's quite interesting in its own context, otherwise, you may not be interested.

[omginternets]

Yes, yes. I need help appreciating it :)