John Conway's Game of Life
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton played on a grid of cells. It follows three rules: a dead cell with exactly three live neighbors comes to life, a live cell with two or three live neighbors survives, and every other cell dies or stays dead. That is the whole game.
Out of those three rules come still lifes that never change, oscillators that pulse forever, spaceships that travel across the grid, guns that fire an endless stream of them, and methuselahs that grow from a handful of cells for thousands of generations before they settle.
Conway needed no computer to find them: He worked the rules out on a Go board in 1970..
Our iPad App
Study how trivial patterns evolve into complexity, or vanish after a couple of generations.
- Draw arbitrary patterns and watch how they evolve
- Explore and combine 100+ popular patterns from an expanding catalog, grouped into still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, guns and methuselahs
- Step through the evolution one generation at a time, or rewind to take the last steps back
- Randomize the world with a random seed and watch what survives
- Save the worlds you want to revisit and load them again later
- Export worlds as standard RLE files or images to share them
- Follow population, births, deaths and density as they change, with automatic cycle detection
- Style the world with eight cell shapes, five color schemes, grid and afterglow trail options
