🧬 Conway's Game of Life
A cellular automaton with simple rules and surprisingly complex behavior. Draw cells with your mouse, pick a pattern, tune the speed.
Click and drag to paint or erase cells. The grid resizes to match your cell size.
Rules
- A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors stays alive.
- A live cell with fewer than 2 neighbors dies of loneliness.
- A live cell with more than 3 neighbors dies of overcrowding.
- A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors comes to life.
What it is
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton: an infinite two-dimensional grid of square cells, each either "alive" or "dead" at any moment. The entire grid's next state is fully determined by the current one and four simple rules applied to every cell simultaneously.
Despite the simple rules, the behavior is astonishingly rich. The grid becomes a tiny universe: some configurations vanish instantly, others freeze in place, others pulsate, glide across the field, or spawn endless streams of new shapes. At scale, the same rules produce chaotic explosions, neat little machines, and full-blown computing systems.
Life is formally Turing complete: you can build logic gates, wires, memory registers and even a working computer out of nothing but live cells. That makes it a favorite playground for mathematicians, programmers and philosophers thinking about how complexity emerges from simple rules — Conway famously called it a "zero-player game".
History
The Game of Life was invented by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970 at Cambridge. He was looking for the simplest possible rule set that would produce long-lived, unpredictable behavior without either dying out completely or growing without bound.
In October 1970 Martin Gardner introduced Life in his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, and it became an instant worldwide hit. Students and engineers spent hours of mainframe time watching gliders and pulsars, and Conway offered a $50 prize for the first example of a pattern that grew without limit.
In less than a month the prize was claimed by Bill Gosper's team at MIT, who discovered the "Gosper glider gun" — a stationary contraption that emits gliders forever. Since then, enthusiasts have built adders, registers, displays and even an emulator of Life inside Life.
Famous patterns
- Block
- Still lifes — stable shapes that never change. The most famous is the 2×2 block.
- Blinker / Pulsar
- Oscillators — patterns that repeat their state in a cycle. The blinker does it in 2 steps; the pulsar takes 15.
- Glider / Lightweight spaceship
- Spaceships — patterns that repeat shape while drifting across the grid. The glider is the smallest; the LWSS is a bit larger.
- Gosper glider gun
- Guns — stationary structures that emit spaceships forever. Gosper's glider gun fires one glider every 30 steps.
- R-pentomino / Acorn
- Methuselahs — tiny starting patterns that evolve for hundreds or thousands of steps before settling down. R-pentomino runs for 1103 generations; acorn for over 5000.