After a brisk walk away from the old hobbit's farm, you see a red brick building on the side of the road. A sign over the door proclaims it to be
You open the door and step inside. An old human with gray hair beneath a tattered blue conical hat rises and greets you.
"Welcome, seekers of enlightenment! Please pardon the mess, but I've been doing some research." The man hastily pushes aside some stacks of books and scrolls, clearing a path on the cluttered floor so that you can approach the desk.
"I'm Yorregg, and this is my humble schoolhouse. As you can see, I'm somewhat short of students right now -- the summer chores, you know -- so I can enroll you in virtually any subject you care to learn with a minimum of delay. So, what did you want to study?"
You tell him about the strange phenomena you observed in Farmer Greg's fields. "Ah, an aspiring Herbalist! Yes, yes, I have some notes on botanical mathematics... somewhere..." The little man frantically digs through the papers in one of the stacks on the floor. "Here it is! I tried to tell Farmer Greg how to observe and predict the Conway patterns, but I'm afraid he had some difficulty grasping more than the basics. He's a good man, but I'm afraid he lacks a certain natural curiosity.... Now, where was I? Right!
"Yes, the herbs were originally engineered by the Great Wizard John Conway. They were originally confined to magical laboratories, until the Great Wizard Thomas Biskup learned of them. Biskup altered the genetic nature of the seeds to produce a variety which grows in any of seven different forms, according to latitude. Most of the local farmers don't realize that there's really only one species of flora involved, not seven; it is simply the form of the resulting plant that differs, not the underlying nature. The numerological aspect is also quite fascinating; it seems that the number seven has many mystical properties. That's why the week is divided into seven days, for example, and why the musical scale --"
You clear your throat discreetly. "Ah, right! The plants! Yes, when Conway originally created the new life form, he bound its growth by magical rules in order to prevent it from ravaging the planet and devouring everything in its path. He called the herbs a cellular automaton, because they grow in neat little square blocks all by themselves."
The wizard pushes some carts of potions aside to reveal a blackboard on one of the walls. He pulls a tiny piece of chalk from his dusty robes and begins to sketch a simple diagram on the slate.
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"Consider a single specimen in isolation. Because of the cellular nature of its growth, its life or death depends on the occupancy of the eight neighboring cells. The single plant shown here will die when the magical growth waves hit it, because it has no neighbors. Nobody knows exactly what causes the magical growth waves. They seem to occur with annoying unpredictability. It's not sure whether Conway or Biskup is the original source of the growth-wave phenonemon, but my personal research seems to indicate that it was Biskup's intervention in the genetic structure that caused the organisms to flourish only in the presence of a certain sort of magical radiation that only occurs when a special astrological conjunction of 5 planets and 23 stars --"
You cough quietly. "Oh, sorry! Let's see... right, neighbors! The minimum condition for stability in the Conway-Biskup flora is the presence of three mature plants. A plant with no neighbors, or with only one neighbor, will wither and die. I suppose they become lonely. Ha! Ha! Well, a plant-cell with exactly two or three neighbors will continue to live. If there are more than three neighbors, the plant will die due to resource starvation. Those are the rules that Conway bespelled into the seeds to prevent the new organism from dominating the natural flora, which would have been a most disastrous development!
"Oh, I can't forget the last rule. In order for a new plant to flourish, the cell in question must have precisely three neighbors. Like the number seven, the number three has a special numerological significance, which can be observed in --" You glare at the old man warningly. "Well, that's a topic for a different class, I suppose."
The old man reaches down and excavates a small stack of scrolls from the piles on the floor. "If you have the time, you can stay and read some more treatises on the subject. I don't have the time to copy these scrolls for you, because my last apprentice left me years ago, but you're welcome to read them here, or copy them yourself if you've brought scribe's materials with you."
You look through the scrolls and note some of the titles
Head back.