You probably know Conway's Game of Life, the famous cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Conway. Life is a set of rules that, together, allow you to simulate a two-dimensional board of cells. The rules decide which cells on the board live and which ones die. With some imagination, you could say that Life is a zero-player game: a game with the objective to find patterns with interesting behavior, like the famous glider.
A zero-player game... Until today. You are to write a program that plays the Game of Life - and plays it to win, while your opponent's program tries to do the same. The winner is either the last bot standing, or the player with the most live cells after 5 minutes of clock time.