Life-like cellular automaton

[1] The other two notations unpack the same sequence of bits into a string of characters that is more easily read by a human.

In the notation used by Mirek's Cellebration, a rule is written as a string x/y where each of x and y is a sequence of distinct digits from 0 to 8, in numerical order.

[2][3] In the notation used by the Golly open-source cellular automaton package and in the RLE format for storing cellular automaton patterns, a rule is written in the form By/Sx where x and y are the same as in the MCell notation.

Most finite patterns in rules whose notation begins with B2, and all finite patterns in rules beginning with B1, grow in all directions rather than remaining of bounded size, with a front that moves at the speed of light.

[4] There are other cellular automata which are inspired by the Game of Life, but which do not fit the definition of "life-like" given in this article, because their neighborhoods are larger than the Moore neighborhood, or they are defined on three-dimensional lattices, or they use a different lattice topology.