<language> Logic of Inheritance, Functions and Equations.
An object-oriented, functional, constraint-based language by Hassan Ait-Kacy <hak@prl.dec.com> et al of MCC, Austin TX, 1987. LIFE integrates ideas from LOGIN and LeFun.
Mailing list: life-users@prl.dec.com.
See also Wild_LIFE.
["Is There a Meaning to LIFE?", H. Ait-Kacy et al, Intl Conf on Logic Prog, 1991].
(21 Apr 1995)
<games> A cellular automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970). The game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand.
Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells which are updated simultaneously at each step according to the following rules:
If a cell has one or zero neighboring cells, it dies. If a cell has two or three neighboring cells, it survives. If an empty cell has exactly three neighbours, a new cell is born. If a cell has more than three neighours, it dies due to overcrowding.
Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence.
(21 Apr 1995)
The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!"
(21 Apr 1995)