Monominoes

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The Monominoes

Let's open our discussion with the monominoes - actually just the monomino. Monomino comes from mono- (meaning 1) and polyomino, so they're polyominoes made from one square. There is only one monomino, and it is this:

Yes, monomino is, in a sense, just another word for "square".

How would Conway's game of life go about with a monomino? To find out, let's start the game.

The game begins with a grid of cells like this:

Then you fill in one of the squares to represent the monomino:

Now that we have the cell, the game begins. In each step, the following things happen:

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.

Note: neighbors of cells can be horizontal, vertical, or diagonal.

In this site, I'll color-code cells like so: blue cells are alive, green cells were once alive but are now dead, and white cells are dead and have never been alive.

Since we now know the rules, let's examine how the game goes.

The only live cell has 0 live neighbors, so by rule 1 it becomes dead. None of the dead cells have exactly three live neighbors, so they all remain dead. So now the board looks like this:

Now that all the cells are dead, nothing else happens. That's it. That's ... literally ... IT.

So the monominoes were rather dull alright, but that's not surprising ... after all do you think the behavior was going to be spectacular with something so fundamental? Up next are the dominoes.

Dominoes