Forum Discussion
Patrick2788
Jan 25, 2024Silver Contributor
Utilizing Excel's turing capabilities to create Conway's 'Game of Life'
The Background It's been said with Lambda (and LET and a wealth of functions in 365) Excel has become 'turing-complete'. To quote the article linked below: "You can now, in principle, write any co...
Patrick2788
Sep 22, 2025Silver Contributor
I'm never satisfied so here's another go at it!
//MooreAggλ is a generalized Moore (or Von Neumann) neighborhood aggregation
//function in the polishing stages.
Lifeλ =
LAMBDA(
config, //Board consisting of 1s and 0s
generations,//Cellular automata states to simulate
IF(generations=0,config,
LET(
neighbors,MooreAggλ(config,SUM,,1),
keep,(config)*(neighbors=2)+(neighbors=3), //Alive with 2 or 3 neighbors
revive,((config=0)*(neighbors=3)), //Dead with 3 neighbors
Lifeλ(
IF(keep+revive,1,0),
generations-1))))