Garden of Eden

A Garden of Eden is a pattern that has no parents and thus can only occur in generation 0. The term was first used in connection with cellular automata by John W. Tukey, many years before Conway's Game of Life was conceived. 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.

Orphans

A related concept to Gardens of Eden is that of orphans, which are finite patterns that can not occur as part of the evolution of another pattern. That is, they are Gardens of Eden that can be extended in any way to perform other Gardens of Eden.

Examples

Several Gardens of Eden have been constructed, the first by Roger Banks et al. at MIT in 1971. In 1974 J. Hardouin-Duparc, et al. produced a 6 × 122 example.

External links

• Garden of Eden at the Life Lexicon