How to play the Game of Life
- Press Play to watch the famous Gosper glider gun shoot gliders across the grid, or choose another pattern from the list.
- Draw your own cells by clicking or dragging, erase with right-click or shift-drag, and press Random to fill the grid with noise and see what emerges.
- Use Step to go one generation at a time, and the speed slider to slow down or speed up. Turn wrapping off to make the edges solid walls.
Four rules, endless patterns
Conway's Game of Life, invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970, is a "zero-player game": you set up the starting cells and the rules do the rest. Each cell is alive or dead, and at every step it looks at its eight neighbours. A live cell with two or three live neighbours survives; with fewer it dies of loneliness, with more it dies of overcrowding. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life.
From these simple rules come still lifes that never change, oscillators like the pulsar that repeat, spaceships like the glider that travel across the grid, and guns that produce endless streams of gliders. The R-pentomino, just five cells, takes 1,103 generations to settle down. The Game of Life is even Turing complete: in principle it can compute anything a computer can. It is a classic introduction to cellular automata, emergence and complexity, and it runs entirely in your browser.
What are the rules of the Game of Life?
A live cell survives with 2 or 3 live neighbours; a dead cell becomes alive with exactly 3. All other cells die or stay dead.
What is a glider?
A five-cell pattern that moves one cell diagonally every four generations, the most famous "spaceship".
Who invented the Game of Life?
British mathematician John Horton Conway, in 1970. It became famous through Martin Gardner's column in Scientific American.