The Game of Life, also known as Conway's Game of Life or simply Life, is a cellular automaton devised by
the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game, meaning that its
evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. One interacts with the Game of
Life by creating an initial configuration and observing how it evolves. It is Turing complete and can
simulate a universal constructor or any other Turing machine.
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite, two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of
which is in one of two possible states, live or dead (or populated and unpopulated, respectively). Every
cell interacts with its eight neighbours, which are the cells that are horizontally, vertically, or
diagonally adjacent. At each step in time, the following transitions occur:
(1) Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by
underpopulation.
(2) Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next
generation.
(3) Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by
overpopulation.
(4) Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if
by reproduction.
The initial pattern constitutes the seed of the system. The first generation is created by applying the
above rules simultaneously to every cell in the seed, live or dead; births and deaths occur
simultaneously, and the discrete moment at which this happens is sometimes called a tick. Each
generation is a pure function of the preceding one. The rules continue to be applied repeatedly to
create further generations.
Wikipedia - Conway's Game
of Life
How to Play
Click a cell to turn it on or off.
Zoom in and out by scrolling the mouse wheel. You can zoom in and out by chaning the zoom input on the
left menu
Move your position on the grid by clicking the dragging the mouse or using the arrow keys. You can also
hold shift and press the arrow keys to move all the cells by 1 tile.
You can change the cell color and background color in the left menu. Check multi-color mode to allow each
cell to have a unique color. New cells that are created will have the combined color of it's 3 neighbors
producing some interesting results. WARNING: Multi-color mode will run much slower with
many cells on the screen.
Click the 'Next' button from the left menu to progress to the next generation. Cells will live or die
using the rules stated above. Click 'Play' to continously progress through generations. Change the speed
to make the simulation run faster or slower.
You can download your own custom patterns by typing a name in the 'Name' field and clicking download.
Click 'Upload' to upload your patterns.
Have fun!