In the study of cellular automata, Garden of Eden patterns are configurations that cannot be reached from any other starting configuration. They are named after the biblical Garden of Eden because they have no predecessor configurations—they must be created as such.

These configurations were named by John Tukey in the 1950s, long before John Conway invented his Game of Life.

General consequences

Let some configuration at timestep t be denoted by C_t, and the function (the automaton) f to map the configuration C_t to C_t+1.

A Garden of Eden pattern G_t means that there does not exist any configuration G_t-1 such that f(G_t-1)=G_t. This means that the automaton is not surjective.

Garden of Eden patterns are not unique.

External links

• Garden of Eden (Eric Wesstein's Treasure Trove of The Game of Life)