Conway's Game of Life borders rules

Solution 1:

As others have said, there are no official border rules because Conway designed the game for an infinite grid. As such there are no borders to make rules about.

If you are implementing this as a computer program and you want to give the illusion of an infinite grid that goes on beyond the user's view, you must design the program so that it updates more cells than are currently visible to the user. The data component of your program might be implemented as a 500 x 500 array even though you are only drawing the middle 300 x 300 to the screen. Any cells beyond the 500 x 500 grid would be permanently dead for the sake of your program.

This is analogous to what computers do when working with real numbers. There is a certain amount of precision that is limited by hardware, yet that precision may be much greater than what is displayed to the user at the end of a calculation, especially if the number of decimals is fixed to the size of a display.

At some point, the decimal expansion of a number must be rounded off, but for instance a calculator can give the illusion of having unlimited information to a naive user who divides by 1000 and sees new digits of pi come from the abyss.