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Garden of Eden pattern - Definition and Overview |
| Related Words: Action, Activity, Acts, Address, Air, Anatomy, Antitype, Archetype, Architecture, Arrangement, Automatism, Background, Barometer, Bearing |
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A Garden of Eden pattern, discovered by R. Banks in 1971, the first such pattern discovered in Conway's Game of Life. In the study of cellular automata, a Garden of Eden pattern is a configuration that is not reached from any other starting configuration. That is, there is no possible predecessor configuration that evolves into the Garden of Eden configuration.
These configurations were christened as such before Conway's Game of Life, by John Tukey.
General consequences
Let some configuration at timestep t be denoted by Ct, and the function (the automaton) f to map the configuration Ct to Ct+1.
A Garden of Eden pattern Gt means that there does not exist any configuration Gt-1 such that f(Gt-1)=Gt. This means that the automaton is not surjective.
Garden of Eden patterns are not unique.
External links
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