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Aha, much neater. Thanks.

Yes, well spotted crates, in any case 'pp' is 'shopping's centre' not 'shopping centre'.

A big thanks to Mersault for pointing out the omission in the preamble. I was merrily bringing cells back to life if they had 3 live neighbours wondering what the end point would be !

It seems to me there is another critical ambiguity though. If we assume that the initial pattern of start cells constitutes the 'seed' of the system, as in the 'rules of the Game', then it is the first and not the second generation cells that spell the name of the Game. I wonder if the setter has made another error here or whether they truly intend us to play out another generation ? In the interests of fairness I guess both options will have to be accepted.

Crosswhit, I wouldn't care to predict what will be accepted. However you read the word 'generation', I think that two iterations are required. In genetics, the start point is generation 0. In this case the second generation should reveal a representation of something with a connection to the broader interpretation of the name of the game.

In the Game the initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the 4 rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed—births and deaths occur simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick (in other words, each generation is a pure function of the preceding one). The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to create further generations. Generations in Genetics may indeed be numbered differently, but in this Game it's the first generation that represents the puzzle's title.

I don't disagree with what you say, Crosswhit. Without getting further into P, F1, F2 terminology, I think it suffices to agree that the setter's preamble was ambiguous, as well as imprecise on the rules.

This morning I retraced my steps from F1 (the name) to F2 and came up with a different result. I don't know what happened yesterday, but this morning I used different grids for the different generations and assume this is the more reliable result. At any rate, the F2 result is now amorphous and so settles the argument beyond doubt !

Sorry to sound stupid but how does the information in the first part of the message give the start cells?

Could someone spell out to me the wordplay in 5 AC ?

Thanks.

S(MALL)CUR-TRIED minus T

s[mall]cur[t]ried.

Snap!