Caveat Cacher
The coordinates above will lead you outside Gonville and Caius College, of which Conway was a Fellow but there’s nothing to see there.
The Game of Life
In 1970, John Horton Conway, then a fellow at Gonville and Caius College, invented the ‘Game Of Life’. An article in ‘Scientific American’ by Martin Gardner followed quickly, and since then it’s become, to the general public at least, one of the DPMMS’s best-known creations.
Although we call it a game, what Conway actually invented was set of simple rules for evolving patterns of cells on a grid. Imagine a chessboard with stones in some of the squares to represent cells: Conway’s rules tell you how to make a new pattern. Although chess boards are easy to find, they’re too small for most patterns. Conway himself used a Go board for early explorations.
Obviously this process can be repeated ad infinitum. In practice people play the game in a computer: it gets tedious to calculate thousands of iterations by hand, and it helps if the grid is big enough that nothing ever reaches the edges. However, with a computer it’s easy to generate millions of iterations on an enormous grid which can then be strung together to make a movie showing the pattern’s evolution.
Conway’s game is called Life for two reasons. Firstly, the rules have a vaguely biological flavour to them: cells can die out through loneliness or overcrowding; new cells are born when there are enough parents around. Explicitly:
- Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies.
- Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies.
- A new cell is born to any empty cell with exactly three live neighbours.
The second reason people call it Life is that although these rules are very simple, the patterns they generate are complicated and have an almost organic feel. Some patterns are boring: they stay unchanged from generation to generation. However, others grow, blossoming into new and varied shapes. Between these two extremes are patterns which evolve in a more systematic way: for instance moving across the grid in an essentially uniform manner.
As with real life, people have tried to tame Conway’s Life, and amazingly they’ve succeeded. For example, people have found ways to encode data in patterns and manipulate them. This opens the way to build a computer in Life itself. However, such patterns tend to be quite large and thus evolve rather slowly. For the most part, they remain only intellectual curiosities.
A simple example of Life engineering is shown below. In it you can see two complicated shapes which oscillate left and right, bouncing between two stable shapes (called blocks). When the complicated shapes collide, they create another pattern (called a glider) which trundles off to the south-east.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Cache of Life
[Click here]
The cache is hidden in a not entirely random location within a mile of the headline co-ordinates.
The cache was moved across the street in May 2022, and the puzzle has changed slightly. Please feel free to contact the CO if you solved the older version of the puzzle and don't want to solve the new one.
