Impact

Despite - or rather because - of its simplicity Life became very popular among scientists of very different specialisations because there are interesting analogies to many subjects:

Biology (Life as microcosm on cell level: ecology, population dynamics, genetics and behavioural research)

Physics (particles, forces, initial value problems)

Chemistry (energy and matter)

Computer Engineering (Life as macrocosm)

as well as to economics, informatics, mathematics, electronics and many more.
Life is an easily understood and almost ideal example for the spontaneous emergence of design and organisation in absence of any creative consciousness or 'creator'. The questions arising when playing Life remind one instinctively of the ongoing struggle between evolution and creation disciples, between darwinists and creationists.

American philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel C. Dennett used the universe of Life to explain possible genesis processes of consciousness or the 'free will' depending on the likewise quite simple physical laws governing our real universe.
And Paul Rendell has proven that it is possible to construct a complete (though very slow) Turing machine within Life.

Conway himself said about his creation more than 30 years later:

'My little life game is surprising because from the simple laws one wouldn't expect to find things move in a sort of purposive manner (...)'

'The rules of my Life game are tiny trivial things, and the rules of the universe (...) we've been trying to understand them for thousands of years and we know we haven't finished yet by any means, so one can't really expect too much but already these tiny trvial laws exhibit interesting behaviour (...)'

'It proved an important point which is that a system like this could have some of the properties of the real universe. So in a way its design was copied but in a fairly trivial way from real life biology and (...) correspondingly it became a kind of artificial biology."

The 'glider', found by the mathematician Richard K. Guy as the first 'mobile' object with the ability to move diagonally across the field, has become a generally accepted symbol of the hacker culture over the last years. Its use on websites or T-shirts expresses affinity or at least sympathy with hacker philosophy respectively the open source community (Linux, GNU, perl etc.). The glider was a rather obvious choice: for one thing it was born around the same time as Unix or the Internet. And for another, the Game of Life appeals a lot to hackers...

Background