The Model 

The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is the best-known example of a cellular automaton. The model is actually a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state. There is no need for input from human players during the run, hence it the agent-based model architecture is a perfect fit for it.

This model is an example implementation of Game of Life, download it here.
Just unpack the downloaded archive into the sample directory of the Fables IME installation. The model is accessable through the Example Project Wizard afterwards. 

How does it work?

The world of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states; living or dead. Every cell interacts with all its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are directly horizontally, vertically, or diagonally connected to it. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:

1. Any living cell with fewer than two living neighbors dies, as if by loneliness.
2. Any living cell with more than three living neighbors dies, as if by overcrowding.
3. Any living cell with two or three living neighbors lives, unchanged, to the next generation.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three living neighbors comes to life.

The initial pattern constitutes the first generation of the system. The second generation is created by applying the above rules simultaneously to every cell in the first generation - births and deaths happen simultaneously, in ticks. The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations. 

Modifying the model

Try to implement other rules for the neighbourhood relation. Give some different rules to the numberOfNeighbours(x, y) function and see how does it influence the model's behavior.

Related Models

• Altruism Population viscosity and the evolution of altruism (Mitteldorf and Wilson, 2000).
• Randomwalk Fleas are jumping on the flat.
• Schelling Schelling's segregation model.
• Voting Rudy Rucker's "Artificial Life Lab"

References

• MATHEMATICAL GAMES
  The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life" by Martin Gardner
  Scientific American 223 (October 1970): 120-123.
• Conway's Game of Life
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia