Conway’s Game of Life — Interactive Simulator

Draw on the grid, press Play, tweak rules (B/S), enable wrap, and share your creation. Runs entirely in your browser.

Controls

12 gen/s
25%

Tip: click or drag to toggle cells • Shift = erase • Ctrl/⌘ = draw

Simulation

Generation: 0
Population: 0

What is Conway’s Game of Life?

Conway’s Game of Life is a playful, visual way to explore how complex behavior can emerge from simple rules. It is a grid-based simulation where each square, or cell, is either alive or dead. At each step, the grid updates based only on the local neighborhood around every cell. Even though the rules are minimal, the system can produce surprising patterns like moving “gliders,” repeating oscillators, and intricate long-term structures. This simulator lets you watch those patterns unfold in real time and experiment with different starting designs.

The classic Game of Life uses the rule set called B3/S23. That shorthand means a dead cell is born if it has exactly three live neighbors, and a live cell survives if it has two or three neighbors. Any other case dies off. Because every update is simultaneous, the grid behaves like a tiny world with its own physics. It is a great introduction to cellular automata, emergence, and rule-based systems often discussed in computer science, mathematics, and complexity science.

How to use this simulator

  • Draw cells by clicking or dragging on the grid. Use Ctrl/⌘ to force draw and Shift to erase.
  • Press Play to start the simulation, then adjust the Speed slider for faster or slower generations.
  • Step advances a single generation, which is handy for studying small patterns.
  • Load a pattern like a Glider, Pulsar, or Gosper Gun to see classic Game of Life behavior.
  • Toggle Wrap if you want the edges to connect like a torus, which changes how patterns travel.
  • Experiment with rules such as HighLife (B36/S23) or Seeds (B2/S) to create new behaviors.
  • Share your setup by copying a link that preserves the grid, rules, speed, and wrap mode.

Why it matters

Beyond being fun to watch, the Game of Life is a classic example of emergent behavior. Researchers and educators use it to illustrate how local rules can create global structure, a concept that appears in topics like ecology, network theory, and artificial life. It also has historical importance in computer science: the Game of Life is known to be computationally universal, meaning it can simulate logic and computation with the right patterns. For students, it is a hands-on way to build intuition about algorithms, discrete time steps, and simulation modeling. This version runs entirely in your browser, so your designs stay private and the experience is instant.

References & Further Reading

External links open in a new tab. Not affiliated with Starlight Tools.

5 Fun Facts about the Game of Life

Gliders never stop

The tiny five-cell glider drifts diagonally forever, advancing one cell every 4 generations—first proof that Life supports self-moving “spaceships.”

Classic mover

Guns = infinite growth

The Gosper Glider Gun (a preset here) spits out a new glider every 30 generations. Its discovery in 1970 was the first pattern with unbounded growth.

Endless stream

R-pentomino chaos

Five cells placed as the R-pentomino thrash around for 1,103 generations before settling into 116 still lifes and oscillators—try it via the Patterns menu.

Long fuse

Life = universal computer

With glider streams as signals, Life can build logic gates, memory, even full CPUs. Your browser grid can, in theory, simulate any computation.

Turing complete

Wrap changes destiny

Enable Wrap and the grid becomes a torus: gliders loop endlessly instead of escaping, and some “dying” patterns become oscillators.

Toroidal twist

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