Importance
Gliders are important to the Game of Life because they are easily produced, can be collided with each other to form more complicated objects, and can be used to transmit information over long distances. For instance, eight gliders can be positioned so that they collide to form a Gosper glider gun. Glider collisions designed to result in certain patterns are also called glider syntheses.
Gliders can also be collided with other patterns with interesting results. For example, if two gliders are shot at a block in just the right way, the block will move closer to the source of the gliders. If three gliders are shot in just the right way, the block will move farther away. This "sliding block memory" can be used to simulate a counter, which would be modified by firing gliders at it. It is possible to construct logic gates such as AND, OR and NOT using gliders. One may also build a pattern that acts like a finite state machine connected to two counters. This has the same computational power as a universal Turing machine, so, using the glider, the Game of Life is theoretically as powerful as any computer with unlimited memory and no time constraints: it is Turing complete.
Read more about this topic: Glider (Conway's Life)
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“There are of course people who are more important than others in that they have more importance in the world but this is not essential and it ceases to be. I have no sense of difference in this respect because every human being comprises the combination form.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“There are secret articles in our treaties with the gods, of more importance than all the rest, which the historian can never know.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)