PHASE-TRANSITIONS NEAR THE GAME OF LIFE

Whether or not the cellular automaton (CA) ''game of Life'' is an exam ple of self-organized criticality has been a controversial question. H ere we view the problem from a different perspective by introducing pr obabilities into the rules. Thereby we extend the discrete space of de terministic CA to a hypercubic space of stochastic CA, where each corn er represents a deterministic CA. We examine the scaling structure nea r the ''game of Life'' corner and identify a phase-transition line sep arating ''Life'' and ''Death.'' The transition line ends very close to but not in the ''game of Life.''