Dominoes
The Dominoes
We've reviewed the monominoes - their behavior is quite uninteresting. Now let's look at the dominoes (not the game, just the combinations of two squares), see if those are a little more interesting.
As with the monominoes, there is only one domino:
Dominoes allow for slightly more variation than polyominoes, as the domino can be rotated to produce:
But that, still, does not make for a very interesting game. Following the rules we start with this grid:
To recap here are the five rules:
1. A live cell with 0 or 1 live neighbors becomes a dead cell.
2. A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors stays alive.
3. A live cell with 4 or more live neighbors becomes a dead cell.
4. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes alive.
5. Other dead cells remain dead.
There's somewhat more variation this time in the number of live neighbors of cells. Both of the live cells neighbor exactly one live cell, and therefore they die in the next step. No dead cells neighbor exactly 3 live cells though, so they remain dead. Therefore the grid will look like this:
and then, since all the cells are dead, nothing happens.
Just about the same thing happens with the vertically oriented domino - to see what would happen to that in the game of life just look at the above pictures and twist your head 90 degrees :)
The domino's behavior still was rather uninteresting. However, when working with the two (yes two, not just one) trominoes things get somewhat more interesting, and several notable concepts in the game of life are introduced.