The Game of Life

by Odysseas Economides, ROBO

The Game of Life
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. It is Turing complete and can simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine. The universe of the Game of Life is a two-dimensional orthogonal grid of cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
 
1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.
 
This is an interactive installation. More specifically, if you make a low-pitch noise, then the simulation will spawn randomly new cells and if you make a high-pitch noise, then the cells will change color!

Artist Bio

Odysseas Economides graduated from the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering of UCY with excellence. During his bachelor’s degree, he had the opportunity to participate in Huawei’s scholarship award program Seeds of the Future and afterward complete an internship research project in Artificial Neural Networks and Reinforcement Learning, at the CSElab, in one of the world’s top 10 universities, ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He attended various hackathon events and won the “Global Peoples’ Choice Finalist” and “Local Peoples’ Choice Winner” at Space Apps Challenge by NASA (April 2017), while working as a part-time researcher at KIOS Center of Excellence. He continued as a full-time researcher after completing his degree. Shortly afterward he got involved in innovation and entrepreneurship, where he attended and won the UCY Center for Enteurpreneurship SINN competition. Following the SINN he graduated from the Idea Innovation Center and the European Innovation Academy. He then was pursued to join Michael Tyrimo’s team in DigitalTree, where he was promoted to the position of Product Manager of the leading portal Ergodotisi and Deliveryman. Odysseas left his job at DigitalTree in order to focus on ROBO and this proposal’s project, while working part-time, as a Research Engineer at KIOS Center of Excellence in order to be able to fund his initiative. His project management and entrepreneurial background in combination with his highly skilled technical and research background, make him a perfect fit for the position of project coordinator, for the specific proposal.