Conway’s Game of Life (Interactive)
Draw on the grid, press Play, and watch complexity emerge. Load famous patterns, tweak rules (B/S), enable wrap mode, and share your creation — all running privately in your browser.
What is Conway’s Game of Life?
Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton — a simple, grid-based system that evolves in discrete steps according to local rules. Each cell is either alive or dead. On every generation, each cell looks at its eight neighbors and updates using birth (B) and survival (S) conditions. The classic Life rules are B3/S23: a dead cell with exactly three live neighbors is born; a live cell survives with two or three neighbors; otherwise it dies. Despite the simplicity, Life produces gliders, oscillators, spaceships, and even universal computation.
How to use this simulator
- Draw by clicking or dragging. Hold Ctrl/⌘ to force draw, Shift to erase.
- Play/Pause to run; adjust Speed (generations/sec); use Step for one generation.
- Pick a Pattern (Glider, Pulsar, Gosper Gun, LWSS, R-pentomino) and place it centered.
- Toggle Wrap to make edges connect (toroidal world), useful for spaceships.
- Try other rules (e.g., HighLife B36/S23 or Seeds B2/S).
- Use Random fill to explore emergent behavior; tune density for different textures.
- Press Copy Share Link to get a URL that recreates the grid, rules, speed, and wrap mode.
Why it matters
Life is used worldwide in mathematics, computer science, complexity science, and education. It demonstrates how complex patterns emerge from simple local interactions, and it’s a gentle entry point into cellular automata, simulation, and rule-based systems. This implementation runs entirely client-side for privacy and speed.
References & Further Reading
Conway’s Game of Life has inspired decades of research, art, and exploration in mathematics, computer science, and complexity theory. If you’d like to dive deeper, here are some reliable references:
- Conway’s Game of Life (Wikipedia) — overview, rules, and famous patterns.
- Game of Life at Wolfram MathWorld — mathematical properties and rule variations.
- Conway, J. H. (1970). “The Game of Life.” Published in Scientific American (October 1970, Martin Gardner’s column) .
- LifeWiki — community-maintained encyclopedia of Life patterns, oscillators, spaceships, and guns.
- Cellular Automata (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) — broader context of automata theory and computation.
All external links open in a new tab. These references are provided for educational purposes and are not affiliated with Starlight Tools.