As a tool

[Hoender]

For a project I am doing, which involves Conway's Game of Life, I want to write a section on the applications of it. I imagine it is mostly in an educational context, but I am struggling to find sources. Any help or direction is appreciated.

[dvgrn]

For a project I am doing, which involves Conway's Game of Life, I want to write a section on the applications of it. I imagine it is mostly in an educational context, but I am struggling to find sources. Any help or direction is appreciated.

That seems to be about right. You can have a look at Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science for all kinds of ideas about ways that various types of CAs can be used as models to explain or model various natural phenomena. CAs can come in handy for some types of agent-based simulations.

However, specific useful real-world applications are kind of sparse. We haven't gotten to the point yet where we can say "Company X used such-and-such CA to program their nanobots, and as a result saved $N billion dollars / built beautiful bridges / automatically filled the holes in twenty million people's roofs after hurricane/hailstorm damage". I hope we get to that point relatively soon, since I want to play around with a nanobot bridge-building kit.

Applications for Conway's Game of Life specifically are even rarer. Maybe "nonexistent" is really the right word, unless you count the educational and artistic applications. It does make a great example to help build intuition about the emergence of complex structures from random initial conditions, via the iterated application of very simple rules.

[otismo]

many geniuses have applied CGoL to their intellects to come up with our ten or is it twelve

Wonders of the World !