Conway's Game of Life produces biological patterns from two simple rules about neighbor count

Conway’s Game of Life (GOL) has two rules: (1) a live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors survives; otherwise it dies (loneliness if fewer than 2, overcrowding if more than 3); (2) a dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors comes alive. From these two rules, complex persistent structures emerge: still-lifes (stable clusters), oscillators (blinkers that alternate), and gliders (patterns that travel across the grid). GOL demonstrates that biological-looking life behavior can arise from purely local arithmetic rules with no biological knowledge encoded. It is historically important as an early computational model discussed by biologists, economists, and neuroscientists.

Examples

Common emergent structures: the blinker (3 cells alternating horizontal/vertical), the glider (5-cell pattern that moves diagonally), still-life blocks. None of these are explicitly programmed — they emerge from the two rules.

Assessment

Implement the GOL calcNextState() method in pseudocode, then predict: starting from a single row of 5 live cells, does the pattern stabilize, oscillate, or grow indefinitely? Justify from the rules.