Editing Conway's Game of Life (section)

==Iteration==
From most random initial patterns of living cells on the grid, observers will find the population constantly changing as the generations tick by. The patterns that emerge from the simple rules may be considered a form of [[mathematical beauty]]. Small isolated subpatterns with no initial symmetry tend to become symmetrical. Once this happens, the symmetry may increase in richness, but it cannot be lost unless a nearby subpattern comes close enough to disturb it. In a very few cases, the society eventually dies out, with all living cells vanishing, though this may not happen for a great many generations. Most initial patterns eventually burn out, producing either stable figures or patterns that oscillate forever between two or more states;<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.geocities.com/conwaylife/|author=Andrzej Okrasinski|title=Game of Life Object Statistics|access-date=July 12, 2009|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090727010353/http://geocities.com/conwaylife/|archive-date=2009-07-27}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=https://conwaylife.com/soup/|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090910010849/https://conwaylife.com/soup/|archive-date=2009-09-10|author=Nathaniel Johnston|title=The Online Life-Like CA Soup Search|access-date=July 12, 2009}}</ref> many also produce one or more gliders or spaceships that travel indefinitely away from the initial location. Because of the nearest-neighbour based rules, no information can travel through the grid at a greater rate than one cell per unit time, so this velocity is said to be the [[Speed of light (cellular automaton)|cellular automaton speed of light]] and denoted ''c''.