life n.
1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and
first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific
American", October 1970); the game's popularity had to wait a few
years for computers on which it could reasonably be played, as
it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many hackers pass
through a stage of fascination with it, 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 much more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the
breakfast cereal, or the human state of existence. 2. The
opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!"