J. Nordfalk et P. Alstrom, PHASE-TRANSITIONS NEAR THE GAME OF LIFE, Physical review. E, Statistical physics, plasmas, fluids, and related interdisciplinary topics, 54(2), 1996, pp. 1025-1028
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.''