Garden of Eden
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A Garden of Eden (or orphan) is a pattern that can only occur in generation 0. The term Garden of Eden was first used in connection with cellular automata by John W. Tukey, many years before Conway's Game of Life was conceived, though John Conway preferred the term orphan. It was known from the start that Gardens of Eden exist in Life because of a theorem by Edward Moore that guarantees their existence in a wide class of cellular automata. Explicit examples have since been constructed, the first by Roger Banks, et al. at MIT in 1971. This example was 9 × 33. In 1974 J. Hardouin-Duparc, et al. produced a 6 × 122 example.
External links
- Garden of Eden at the Life Lexicon