Life
Pronunciation: līf
| Noun | 1. |  life - a characteristic state or mode of living; "social life"; "city life"; "real life" |
| 2. | life - the course of existence of an individual; the actions and events that occur in living; "he hoped for a new life in Australia"; "he wanted to live his own life without interference from others" | |
| 3. | life - the experience of living; the course of human events and activities; "he could no longer cope with the complexities of life" Synonyms: living | |
| 4. | life - the condition of living or the state of being alive; "while there's life there's hope"; "life depends on many chemical and physical processes" | |
| 5. | life - the period during which something is functional (as between birth and death); "the battery had a short life"; "he lived a long and happy life" | |
| 6. | life - the period between birth and the present time; "I have known him all his life" | |
| 7. | life - animation and energy in action or expression; "it was a heavy play and the actors tried in vain to give life to it" | |
| 8. | life - an account of the series of events making up a person's life | |
| 9. | life - the period from the present until death; "he appointed himself emperor for life" | |
| 10. | life - a living person; "his heroism saved a life" | |
| 11. | life - living things collectively; "the oceans are teeming with life" | |
| 12. | life - a motive for living; "pottery was his life" | |
| 13. | life - the organic phenomenon that distinguishes living organisms from nonliving ones; "there is no life on the moon" | |
| 14. | life - a prison term lasting as long as the prisoner lives; "he got life for killing the guard" Synonyms: life sentence |
LIFE. The aggregate of the animal functions which resist death. Bichat.
2. The state of animated beings, while they possess the power of
feeling and motion. It commences in contemplation of law generally as soon
as the infant is able to stir in the mother's womb; 1 Bl. Com. 129; 3 Inst.
50; Wood's Inst. 11; and ceases at death. Lawyers and legislators are not,
however, the best physiologists, and it may be justly suspected that in fact
life commences before the mother can perceive any motion of the foetus. 1
Beck's Med. Jur. 291.
3. For many purposes, however, life is considered as begun from the
moment of conception in ventre sa mere. Vide Foetus. But in order to acquire
and transfer civil rights the child must be born alive. Whether a child is
born alive, is to be ascertained from certain signs which are always
attendant upon life. The fact of the child's crying is the most certain.
There may be a certain motion in a new born infant which may last even for
hours, and yet there may not be complete life. It seems that in order to
commence life the child must be born with the ability to breathe, and must
actually have breathed. 1 Briand, Med. Leg. 1ere partie, c. 6, art. 1.
4. Life is presumed to continue at least till one hundred years. 9
Mart. Lo. R. 257 See Death; Survivorship.
5. Life is considered by the law of the utmost importance, and its most
anxious care is to protect it. 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 202-3.
| 1. | (language) | LIFE - Logic of Inheritance, Functions and Equations. An object-oriented, functional, constraint-based language by Hassan Ait-Kacy Mailing list: life-users@prl.dec.com. See also Wild_LIFE. ["Is There a Meaning to LIFE?", H. Ait-Kacy et al, Intl Conf on Logic Prog, 1991]. | |
| 2. | (games) | Life - The first popular cellular automata based
artificial life "game". Life was invented by British
mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 and was first
introduced publicly in "Scientific American" later that year. Conway first devised what he called "The Game of Life" and "ran" it using plates placed on floor tiles in his house. Because of he ran out of floor space and kept stepping on the plates, he later moved to doing it on paper or on a checkerboard, and then moved to running Life as a computer program on a PDP-7. That first implementation of Life as a computer program was written by M. J. T. Guy and S. R. Bourne (the author of Unix's Bourne shell). Life uses a rectangular grid of binary (live or dead) cells each of which is updated at each step according to the previous state of its eight neighbours as follows: a live cell with less than two, or more than three, live neighbours dies. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive. Other cells do not change. While the rules are fairly simple, the patterns that can arise are of a complexity resembling that of organic systems -- hence the name "Life". Many hackers pass through a stage of fascination with Life, and hackers at various places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented Life in TECO!; see Gosperism). When a hacker mentions "life", he is more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, the 1950s-era board game or the human state of existence. Yahoo!. Demonstration. ["Scientific American" 223, October 1970, p120-123, 224; February 1971 p121-117, Martin Gardner]. ["The Garden in The Machine: the Emerging Science of Artificial Life", Claus Emmeche, 1994]. ["Winning Ways, For Your Mathematical Plays", Elwyn R. Berlekamp, John Horton Conway and Richard K. Guy, 1982]. ["The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge", William Poundstone, 1985]. | |
| 3. | (jargon) | life - The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!" |