The Game of Life

What is the Game of Life?
The Game of Life (or simply Life) is not a game in the conventional sense. There are no players, and no winning or losing. Once the "pieces" are placed in the starting position, the rules determine everything that happens later. Nevertheless, Life is full of surprises! In most cases, it is impossible to look at a starting position (or pattern) and see what will happen in the future. The only way to find out is to follow the rules of the game.

Rules of the Game of Life
Life is played on a grid of square cells--like a chess board but extending infinitely in every direction. A cell can be live or dead. A live cell is shown by putting a marker on its square. A dead cell is shown by leaving the square empty. Each cell in the grid has a neighborhood consisting of the eight cells in every direction including diagonals.

To apply one step of the rules, we count the number of live neighbors for each cell. What happens next depends on this number.

A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell (birth).

A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive (survival).

In all other cases, a cell dies or remains dead (overcrowding or loneliness).

Note: The number of live neighbors is always based on the cells before the rule was applied. In other words, we must first find all of the cells that change before changing any of them. Sounds like a job for a computer!

Background
Life was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970. He choose the rules carefully after trying many other possibilities, some of which caused the cells to die too fast and others which caused too many cells to be born. Life balances these tendencies, making it hard to tell whether a pattern will die out completely, form a stable population, or grow forever.

Life is just one example of a cellular automaton, which is any system in which rules are applied to cells and their neighbors in a regular grid.

There has been much recent interest in cellular automata, a field of mathematical research. Life is one of the simplest cellular automata to have been studied, but many others have been invented, often to simulate systems in the real world.

In addition to the original rules, Life can be played on other kinds of grids with more complex patterns. There are rules for playing on hexagons arranged in a honeycomb pattern, and games where cells can have more than two states (imagine live cells with different colors).

Life is probably the most often programmed computer game in existence. There are many different variations and information on the web. (See the Paul Callahan's home page for more information.)

Why is Life So Interesting?
Life is one of the simplest examples of what is sometimes called "emergent complexity" or "self-organizing systems." This subject area has captured the attention of scientists and mathematicians in diverse fields. It is the study of how elaborate patterns and behaviors can emerge from very simple rules. It helps us understand, for example, how the petals on a rose or the stripes on a zebra can arise from a tissue of living cells growing together. It can even help us understand the diversity of life that has evolved on earth.

How Complex Can Life Get?
A computer can be built inside the Life "universe". Space does not permit a detailed description, but you can find much more information in some of the references given at the bottom. Briefly, streams of gliders and spaceships can be used to send information just as electrical signals are used to send information in a physical computer. These streams of gliders can react in a way to perform all of the logical functions on which a modern computer is based. It would be very impractical to build a computer this way, but given a large enough Life pattern and enough time, we could run any program that runs on a computer. Several interesting special-purpose computers have been constructed as Life, including one that outputs the prime numbers.
A universal constructor can even be built. This is a pattern that can take a blueprint for some other Life pattern (or its own) and build that pattern. No one has built this yet, since it would be very large, but it has been shown to be possible. This means that Life patterns could exist that reproduce themselves. They could even modify their blueprints just as living things combine and mutate their genes. Who can say what would develop in a large enough universe of reproducing Life patterns?

What is Life Good For?
Studying the patterns of Life can result in discoveries in other areas of math and science.

The behavior of cells or animals can be better understood using simple rules. Behavior that seems intelligent, such as we see in ant colonies might just be simple rules that we don't understand yet. Take a look at this simulation of termites piling up woodchips. (click here) There are only 2 rules in this system, and yet, a seemingly "intelligent" pattern emerges. What does this say about the nature of intelligence?

Traffic problems might be solved by analyzing them with the mathematical tools learned from these types of simulations. (Unjamming Traffic with Computers)

Computer viruses are also examples of cellular automata. Finding the cure for computer viruses could be hidden in the patterns of this simple game.

Human diseases might be cured if we could better understand why cells live and die.

Exploring the galaxies would be easier if machines could be invented that could build themselves. Imagine sending a probe to Mars that could build a copy of itself. Although this is theoretically possible, it hasn't been invented yet!

Is Life Alive?
Would living creatures evolve in a sufficiently large Life universe if we waited long enough? We can see that Life, simple as it is to describe, exhibits much of the complexity of our own universe. It is intriguing to ask what would happen in an infinitely large Life space seeded with random patterns. It seems that likely that complexity would emerge beyond what we can see when we watch Life on a computer. Even in our own universe, there is a huge difference between what we know about natural history and what we can observe on a human time frame.

On the other hand, Life has only two dimensions, unlike our own universe, and that is a severe limitation. There are other properties of Life -- the tendency to stabilize locally into oscillators -- that may make it an unlikely place for living things to develop. The answer to this question remains unknown, but Life illustrates at a simplified level the kinds of evolutionary forces that we witness in our own universe.

David Beckham: I've always been a fashion fan

David Beckham has revealed wife Victoria Beckham makes most of his fashion decisions for him.

He told BBC Radio 2 recently: “Without a doubt, Victoria has a huge part in the way I look these days.”


“I think most couples agree you have to listen to your partner and you have confidence in your partner to tell you whether you look good or whether you don’t and to help you out with your fashion and dress sense.”

“In America I am just in shorts, tee shirts and flip flops - although if Victoria is listening, she’ll probably turn round and say the truth, that I actually get my outfit ready the night before.”

“I’m very organised and controlled and need to go to bed at night knowing what I’m going to wear the next morning.”

But it wasn’t hooking up with the Spice Girl that got him interested in fashion: “I always liked to look good, even when I was a little kid. I was given the option when I was a page boy once of either wearing a suit or wearing knickerbockers and long socks and ballet shoes - and I chose the ballet shoes and knickerbockers.”

“It was a little bit strange at the time and my dad gave me a bit of stick - but I was happy.”

aboutDavid Beckham

"Beckham" redirects here. For other uses, see Beckham (disambiguation).
David Beckham

Personal information
Full name David Robert Joseph Beckham
Date of birth 2 May 1975 (1975-05-02) (age 32)
Place of birth Leytonstone, London, England
Height 1.83 m (6 ft 0 in)[1]
Playing position Right winger
Club information
Current club Los Angeles Galaxy
Number 23
Youth clubs
1991–1993 Manchester United
Senior clubs1
Years Club App (Gls)*
1993–2003
1995
2003-2007
2007- Manchester United
→ Preston North End (loan)
Real Madrid
Los Angeles Galaxy 265 (62)
005 0(2)
116 (13)
005 0(0)
National team2
1994–1996
1996– England U21
England 009 0(0)
099 (17)
1 Senior club appearances and goals
counted for the domestic league only and
correct as of 22:12, 16 November 2007 (UTC).
2 National team caps and goals correct
as of 12:00, 21 November 2007 (UTC).
* Appearances (Goals)

David Robert Joseph Beckham, OBE (born 2 May 1975) is an English professional football (soccer) midfielder who plays for and captains Major League Soccer's Los Angeles Galaxy.[2] He is also currently a member of the England national team.

He has twice been runner-up for FIFA World Player of the Year, and as recently as 2004 was the world's highest-paid footballer.[3] He was Google's most searched of all sports topics in both 2003 and 2004.[4] Such global recognition has made him an elite advertising brand and a top fashion icon.[5][6] Beckham was captain of England from 15 November 2000 to 2 July 2006. He made 58 appearances as captain, and ended his tenure in that role after the 2006 FIFA World Cup finals. He continued to make contributions for the England national team in 2007 competitions.[7]

Beckham's career began when he signed a professional contract with Manchester United, making his first-team debut in 1992 aged 17. During his time there, United won the Premiership title six times, the FA Cup twice, and the UEFA Champions League in 1999. He left Manchester United to sign for Real Madrid in 2003, where he remained for four seasons. In his final season, Real clinched the La Liga title (Beckham's only major trophy with the club) in the final game of the season. In January 2007, it was announced that Beckham would leave Real Madrid and sign a five-year contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy.[8] He played his final match with Real on 17 June, after which the team was awarded the 2006–07 La Liga championship.

Beckham's new contract with the Galaxy, effective 1 July 2007, gave him the highest salary of any MLS player in history. He debuted for the team on 21 July in a friendly versus Chelsea FC at the Home Depot Center[9], and on 15 August, he had his first start with the team, scoring his first goal and first assist in the 2007 SuperLiga semi-final. His first league start then came on 18 August, where he recorded two more assists against the New York Red Bulls in front of a record crowd at Giants Stadium.

Childhood and early career
Beckham was born at Whipps Cross Hospital in Leytonstone, London, England; the son of David Edward Alan "Ted" Beckham (b. Edmonton, London, July-September 1948), a kitchen fitter and Manchester United fan, and wife (m. London Borough of Hackney, 1969) Sandra Georgina West (b. 1949) [11], a hairdresser. He regularly played football in Ridgeway Park, Chingford as a child. He attended Chase Lane Primary School and Chingford Foundation School as a child. His mother's family is Jewish,[12] and Beckham has referred to himself as "half Jewish"[13] and spoken of the influence the religion has had on him, although he is not known to practice Judaism or any other faith. In his book Both Feet on the Ground, he stated that growing up he always attended church with his parents and sisters.

His parents were fanatical Manchester United supporters who would frequently travel to Old Trafford from London to attend Manchester United's home matches. David inherited his parents' love of Manchester United and his main sporting passion was football. He attended one of Bobby Charlton's football schools in Manchester and won the chance to take part in a training session at FC Barcelona, as part of a talent competition. As a child he played for a local youth team called the Ridgeway Rovers -coached by his father, Stuart Underwood and Steve Kirby.

He was a Manchester United mascot for a match against West Ham United in 1986. Young Beckham had trials with his local club Leyton Orient, Norwich City and attended Tottenham Hotspur's, which was the first club he played for, school of excellence. During a two-year period in which he played for Brimsdown Rovers' youth team, he was named Under-15 Player of the Year in 1990.[14] He also attended Bradenton Preparatory Academy, but signed schoolboy forms at Manchester United on his fourteenth birthday, and subsequently signed a Youth Training Scheme contract on 8 July 1991.

The new movie ''Lars and the Real Girl''

At Abyss Creations in San Marcos, Calif., interchangeable faces attached to silicone heads wait for a body. The company charges between ,500 and ,000 for the RealDoll of your dreams

Folks find lots of love in their real dolls

The new movie ''Lars and the Real Girl'' is pulling back the curtain on an unusual world where people find companionship in the arms of eerily lifelike silicone dolls.

At the center of that world is a small company, Abyss Creations, which has been making "RealDolls" since 1996 and has so much business that the wait for a new prosthetic partner is three to five months.

Cost per doll: About $6,500, plus shipping. Dolls with custom faces and bodies can run up to $50,000.

That's a lot of money for a sex toy. And don't be fooled by the chaste nature of Lars' relationship with Bianca - most of the customers use their anatomically correct dolls for erotic fantasies.

But Bronwen Keller, a company spokeswoman, said some owners use them as art objects, photography subjects, and as training devices in cosmetology and crime-scene investigation. RealDolls have appeared in the TV shows "My Name Is Earl" and "nip/tuck."

"These dolls become more than a sex toy to most of us," according to one posting on DollForum.com, an Internet meeting place that has 21,000 registered members. "Some of us don't even use them for sex play. We grow to enjoy them as companions, ornaments, hobbies, household decorations; we use them like giant Barbie dolls."

There are owners who buy clothes and makeup for their dolls. They move them around the house as the day unfolds - to the breakfast table, in front of the TV, out in the yard.

The dolls are so realistic, light years beyond the cartoonish vinyl blow-ups of gag-gift fame, that some owners treat them as spouses - even to the point of calling themselves "doll husbands."

Their world is unsettling to others because of what it says about the state of human relationships, or society's morals, or the objectification of women. On the Internet, in particular, doll owners are ridiculed - "When you think about it, 6,500 bucks is exactly how much you saved this year on rent from living in your Mom's basement" - and get called names like "freak," "loser," "perv."

But the Internet has also enabled doll owners to find each other and, as it has in many other areas of modern life, to form a community. They fondly call each other "idollators." Some have moved more into the open, posting videos on YouTube to talk about their dolls, creating MySpace pages, and appearing in "Love Me, Love My Doll," a recent BBC America television documentary.

"Dolls, and the people who play with them, have been around a long time," said Elena Dorfman, a San Francisco-based photographer whose exhibit and book, "Still Lovers," featured RealDolls. "But technology has brought them to life, and out of the closet."

And onto the big screen. In "Lars," Bianca plays Ryan Gosling's love interest, and the attachment is emotional, never sexual. She becomes a silent anchor in his storm-tossed life.

"I'm worried to say this because it makes me sound crazy, but she did have a real presence," Gosling told a reporter after the movie was released. "I really felt some kind of connection to her and a camaraderie. This whole movie rested on our relationship together. She had a very supportive energy."

That energy got its start in the San Marcos, Calif., at Abyss Creations, located in a nondescript, signless building in an industrial park. A dozen employees work there, half of them in the manufacturing plant.

Abyss was started 11 years ago by Matt McMullen, who was working for a Halloween company, fashioning various products out of silicone, including masks. One day he sculpted a half-size woman, thought it was kind of artsy, and posted pictures on the Internet.

Soon he was getting e-mails from people wanting him to make the figure into a life-size sex toy. He quoted a price - $5,000 - he thought nobody would pay. But someone did, upfront and in cash. Suddenly he was in the "love doll" business.

Customers these days can order from 10 female body types and 15 faces. They choose the hairstyle, skin tone, eye color, makeup and nail polish.

Options like tan lines and interchangeable faces drive up the cost, and custom work, which requires sculpting new molds, is especially pricey. A custom face: $10,000. A full-body likeness, such as the one of the character Kimber from "nick/tuck," can top $50,000.

The dolls range in height from 4-foot-10 to 5-foot-7 and weigh between 75 and 115 pounds. There's also a male doll, "Charlie," who is 5-foot-8 and weighs 125 pounds. Metal frames with joints underneath the silicone enable the dolls to be moved into various positions.

Each doll takes about 80 hours to finish, Keller said. The most popular model is "Jenny," 5-foot-3, 92 pounds, 32B-24-33, with blond hair, blue or brown eyes, and medium or tanned skin tone.

Abyss averages one order per day and ships about six to eight dolls each week. Most of the dolls are sold in the United States, Keller said, but there are owners on every continent. About 4,000 dolls have been sold since the company started.

"There is no one type of person who purchases a RealDoll," Keller said. Most are men, frequently ages 55-65, but "there are also a great many couples who own the dolls, and some women." Some own more than one doll, including a man from Texas who has eight.

"We believe that the success of the company comes from the fact that old notions of sexuality as something dirty, bad or needing to be hidden are falling by the wayside," Keller said. "People are still happy to use their disposable, or carefully saved, income to live out their fantasies."

Sex is what attracted a 34-year-old customer-sales representative in Michigan who goes by the name Davecat. He said in a phone interview that when he first got his doll, in July 2000, "it was all sex and nothing but."

That has changed. "What she gives me now is a sense of comfort and peace," he said. "I know she is always there." He jokes that they've been together seven years "and we still manage not to get into arguments."

He said "most idollators are romantic idealists who can't find a relationship with an organic partner they would be totally or even mostly satisfied with."

Gordon Griggs, 40, a factory worker in Virginia, bought his doll Ginger in 2000 after a string of bad experiences with women, including one who ditched him at the prom and another who phoned for a date and then asked him to baby-sit her daughter while she went out with someone else.

"I do not have any desire at all for a real woman now," he wrote on his Web site. "We are perfect for each other. She does not drink, smoke or do drugs. She cannot get pregnant (I never wanted children). She will never steal from me or lie to me. I am totally happy with her!"

Stacy Leigh, 36, a married photographer in New York, said she was attracted to the dolls for an obvious reason: "They're hot!" She owns two, along with extra faces and wigs. She admires the "artisanship," and said the dolls inspire her artistically.

"It's funny, though," she said. "Sometimes I'll knock into one of them, and I find myself apologizing to the doll."

The other photographer, Dorfman, said all her assumptions about doll owners were shattered when she began work on her "Still Lovers" project in 1999.

"I remember flying out to the Midwest to meet a couple, fretting about how I was going to photograph these freakish people having sex with a doll," she said. As it turned out, the couple owned several dolls and never had sex with them.

"That's when it got interesting for me," she said.

She wound up focusing on eight owners, all of them similar to Lars in that their attachment was mostly emotional. "These were people who really cared about their dolls and treated them as significant others, like dear friends," she said. "They were in love."

Dorfman has seen "Lars and the Real Girl" and said she thought it offered pat answers for why people buy dolls - trouble with real women - when her experience was "there are lots of reasons people have dolls."

But she found it realistic in the way it captured how others are "freaked out" by the dolls. "People are afraid of how real they are. They are creepy at first and that never really goes away. They're pretty, and so realistic, but also so vacant."

To her the dolls raise interesting questions about love and "what it means to value an object - a replacement human being, in effect - as real." But she's not sure the dolls say anything about the state of modern society.

"These are the kind of people who have always played with dolls," she said. "If anything is different now, it's the Internet. There is a community for them."

In that community, there is talk about the next stage of doll design, with moving parts and sounds - ever more realism.

Gosling, aka Lars, has shorter-term concerns. He joked in a recent interview that he wants to manage Bianca's campaign for a best-actress Oscar, if for no other reason than to watch famous designers "fighting over who's going to dress her."

There's a romantic notion of buying wine and carefully tucking it away in your cellar, patiently waiting to open it until it's perfectly ready to drin

Technology Uncorked on Fruit of the Vine

There's a romantic notion of buying wine and carefully tucking it away in your cellar, patiently waiting to open it until it's perfectly ready to drink.
But the reality is that most of the wine we buy these days is uncorked and poured within 24 hours of purchase. If it's a young red - especially a bold wine such as a cabernet sauvignon, merlot or petite sirah - it can be somewhat awkward with tannins, acids and flavors that have not had time to become mellow and harmonious.

Decanting and exposing the wine to some air for 30 minutes or so is an age-old way to round out its flavors and aromas.

"Aeration is something very important, especially with younger reds," said Brian Donegan, wine director at Market Restaurant and Bar in Del Mar, Calif. "It allows the tannins to soften up and the fruit to come forward. The wine will feel softer on your palate."

A number of new gadgets promising to improve the flavor of young wines has hit the market recently. The most space age is the Catania Wine Enhancer, a coppery metal disk that promises to harmonize the atoms in your wine in nine to 14 minutes.

The most low-tech is the Wine Whisk, a tiny stainless-steel whisk that a consumer can use to whip up a glass of wine, much like an omelet.

Ostensibly the most technical is the Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator, created by inventor and engineer Rio Sabadicci. Pour wine into the Vinturi, and the fluid exits with a giant sucking sound. Sabadicci said that's the sound of the air mixing with the wine. He was inspired after tasting for the first time a cabernet sauvignon that had been properly decanted.

"I couldn't believe how much better it tasted," he said. "I set off to speed up the process."

Karen MacNeil, author of "The Wine Bible," said devices that aerate wine by passing a stream through funnels or other devices have been used in Europe for years.

"The mere act of pouring wine through a spoutlike device into a decanter does help aerate the wine more thoroughly, quickly and completely," said MacNeil, who is director of wine studies at The Culinary Institute of America in Napa, Calif. But, she added, the devices "are certainly not essential.

"For the wine lover who has everything, it's a nice little extra added touch."

TASTE TEST

With curiosity tinged with skepticism, we put together a tasting panel and decided to see how four of these newer devices fared when compared with an old-fashioned decanter.

I was joined by Danae Rubenstein, an independent wine consultant and writer; Robin Stark, president of Starkland Cellars and a wine educator; Sharon Sausedo, a former wine broker; and Michele Joyce, a restaurant publicist. We tested the devices on a 2004 Lobsinger Stonebarn Vineyard Zinfandel from California's Sonoma County, a wine created by Rubenstein's boyfriend's family.

The panel started by tasting the wine poured from the bottle. It tasted young, with subtle notes of strawberries, blackberries, warm spice and chocolate, a moderate roughness from tannin and vibrant acidity veering toward sharpness.

Here's how the devices ranked on scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the highest:

1. The Vinturi Essential Wine Aerator, $39.95.

How it works: : Wine is poured into the bowl of the Vinturi, and, as it exits, the wine is mixed with air.

The effect: The Vinturi definitely smoothed the acidic flavors in the wine and made it taste more round. But some tasters thought the wine lost some of its brightness and subtle berry aromas. The sucking noise the device makes resembled an embarrassing bodily function.

Score: 3

. The BevWizard Wine Smoother, $29.99.

How it works: The magnetic funnel is placed on the neck of the wine bottle, and wine is poured through the device.

The effect: Tasters detected almost no difference between the unaerated wine and the wine poured through the BevWizard, though the aroma seemed a little more round.

Score: 2 1/2.

3. The Wine Whisk, $24.95.

How it works: Despite marketing materials threatening that the Wine Whisk will add phrases like "hyper-venta-lightful" to your vocabulary, it was a simple matter of whisking the wine in the glass until it had a nice froth.

The effect: Shockingly, the wine improved markedly, becoming rounder and more balanced with less acidic bite and bigger berry aromas and chocolate flavors.

Score: 3 1/2.

4. The Catania Mezzo Wine Enhancer, $64.99.

How it works: A bottle of wine is placed upon a metallic disk made, according to the Catania Web site, of a proprietary blend of metals chosen for their vibrational frequencies, which are said to harmonize the atoms in the wine.

The effect: The berry aromas in the wine seemed more pronounced. Tasters found little difference in the taste of the wine, despite letting the bottle sit for 30 minutes.

Score: 2 3/4.

5. Crystal decanter, $30 and up

How it works: Pour wine into the decanter, wait for 30 minutes or so, and swirl it around a few times before pouring.

The effect: The wine tasted much more mature and smooth, with balanced tannins and acidity and richer notes of chocolate and spice, deep cherry and almost jammy berries.

Score: 4.