According to Wikipedia's article: "The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. " The board is made up of an m x n grid of cells, where each cell has an initial state: live (represented by a 1) or dead (represented by a 0). Each cell interacts with its eight neighbors (horizontal, vertical, diagonal) using the following four rules (taken from the above Wikipedia article): 1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies as if caused by under-population. 2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. 3.