Notice the series of glider guns, similar to the one we built above. While this animation could certainly be created using the above Python code, I'm just not sure I'd have the patience!

Despite (or perhaps because of) its simplicity, the Game of Life has inspired an entire community of people who study its properties. It has influenced fields as diverse as mathematics, computer science, biology, epidemiology, and sociology. This interest has led to the discovery of configurations with some very surprising properties. Incredibly, it has even been shown that a Universal Turing Machine can be created within the rules of the game of life. That is, a computer which can compute game of life steps could, in theory, use this process to compute just about anything!

Here are another few patterns you might try embedding in a game board, to see what will happen.