"Because of Life's analogies with the rise, fall, and alterations of a society of living organisms, it belongs to a growing class of what are called 'simulation games' (games that resemble real-life processes)."[1]

Stanisław Ulam, while working at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1940s, studied the growth of crystals, using a simple lattice network as his model.[7] At the same time, John von Neumann, Ulam's colleague at Los Alamos, was working on the problem of self-replicating systems.[8]: 1