Featured on Rhizome, Life vs. Life is an online adaptation of ’70s mathematician John Conway’s classic game Life. Created by Walker New Media designer Eric Ishii Eckhardt and Justin Bakse, it’s a “cellular automata” game that presents players with a grid of cells that are either on (live) or off (dead), just like Conway’s, but this game has two players facing off on arena-style boards. The pair writes:
In this game we have transformed a harmonious solitary activity into an asynchronous competitive experience. A player creates a pattern which evolves through successive generations. When two patterns are placed opposite each other they do “ battle” over successive generations until one side emerges victorious. We have complemented the battles storing the results and displaying them publicly. The resulting game is a player driven natural selection of cellular autonoma shapes.