9 COLLABORATING ROBOTS: COULD THEY WORK AS PARTNERS OR GROUPS?

Have you ever played Conway's Game of Life? Not the real- world game where you get up and go to work, or even the board game, but the computerized one invented by the British mathematician John Conway in 1970?1 The game plays out on a 2D grid of empty squares. You fill in a few at the start, each of your squares representing a tiny creature (strictly speaking, a cellular automaton). Once you have set up your population, the computer runs a set of simple rules: 1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation. 2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation. 3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation. 4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.