Conway's Game of Life

Simple rules.
Infinite emergence.

A premium, GPU-smooth cellular automaton. Four rules give rise to gliders, oscillators, and self-replicating machines — rendered in living neon.

Begin Simulation Learn the rules

The Ruleset

Four laws govern every cell

Each cell observes its eight neighbours, then lives or dies by the standard B3/S23 rule.

< 2

Underpopulation

A living cell with fewer than two neighbours dies, as if by isolation.

2 – 3

Survival

A living cell with two or three neighbours endures to the next generation.

> 3

Overpopulation

A living cell with more than three neighbours dies, as if by crowding.

= 3

Reproduction

A dead cell with exactly three living neighbours becomes alive.

Specimens

Summon famous structures

Drop a known organism onto the grid and watch it travel, pulse, or manufacture life indefinitely.

Open the library

Glider

The smallest spaceship — a five-cell traveller that crawls diagonally across the universe forever.

Pulsar

A radiant period-3 oscillator — forty-eight cells breathing in perfect, symmetric rhythm.

Gosper Glider Gun

The first known infinite-growth machine — a factory that fires an endless stream of gliders.

Emergence

Complexity with no author

No cell knows what it is building. Yet from these four local laws arise travelling ships, oscillating engines, and structures that compute.

The Game of Life is Turing-complete — given enough space and time, it can calculate anything a computer can. It is a small, beautiful machine that reminds us order need not be designed.

1970

Devised by Conway

∞

Possible states

60 FPS

Engineered for silk-smooth motion

A typed-array engine and HTML5 Canvas renderer keep thousands of cells alive at a steady sixty frames per second — even on a phone.

Uint8

Typed arrays

Canvas

GPU-composited

rAF

Frame-synced

Watch life unfold.

Draw a seed, summon a glider gun, or randomize the void — then press play.

Enter the Simulator

Simple rules. Infinite emergence.