Background: The Game of Life is a simulation game introduced by British mathematician John COnway. It became popular in 1970, when Martin Gardner brought it to the attention of readers of Scientific American.
The simulation takes place on a rectangular grid. Each cell of the grid may be "dead" (vacant) or "alive" (occupied by an organism). The inital configuration of alive cells goes through a series of generations.
In each successive generation, some alive cells die and some new ells are born in vacant places depending on the total number of alive neighbors of the cell.
The "births" and "deaths" follow the following rules:
1. A neighbor of a given cell has a common side or corner with that cell. Each cell inside the grid has 8 neighbors.
2. An alive cell with two or three alive neighbors remains in the next generation; an alive cell with less than two alive neighbors also dies (of exposure).
3. A vacant cell becomes alive in the next generation if it has exactly three alive neighbors.
4. All births and deaths take place at exactly the same time, so that the change from one generation to the next is instantaneous.
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