Timeline of Life facts

Conway's Game of Life is in its forties. This is a timeline of the discoveries of the game patterns and related software or inventions.

1970 A.D.

• John Horton Conway, inventor of the Game of Life.
• First oscillators of periods 2, 3, 4, 8, 14, 15 and 30 found : blinker, pulsar, pinwheel, figure eight, tumbler, pentadecathlon and queen bee shuttle.
• The first c/4 diagonal spaceship discovered by Richard Guy : the glider - the only known till 1999.
• The first c/2 spaceship to be found was the lightweight spaceship, by John Conway

1970s

• Lifeline, first Life newsletter edited and published by Robert Wainwright, March 1971
• The first known puffers that travelled at c/2 orthogonally, found in 1971

1980s

• The HashLife algorithm first described by Bill Gosper in the early 1980s
• Dean Hickerson creates the first oscillator search program in 1989

1990s

• The first non-monotonic spaceship, the 13-engine Cordership, in 1991
• The first c/5 orthogonal spaceship to be discovered was the snail, 1996
• The first true period 24 and 48 guns in June 1997.

2000s

• First oscillators of period 37, 51 found in 2009
• LifeWiki goes live — January 2009
• LifeWiki's 600 patterns milestone — June 2009