Conway's Game of Life
Four rules, applied to every cell every generation: a live cell with 2–3 live
neighbors survives, a dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors is born, everything
else dies. Click cells to draw your own pattern.
Start
Random Seed
Clear
Pause
Generations / sec
8 / sec
How it works: the grid is an 80×80 array of cells, each dead or
alive. Every generation, every cell looks at its 8 neighbors (wrapping around the
edges) and applies the same 4 rules simultaneously: a live cell with fewer than 2
live neighbors dies (underpopulation), a live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors
survives, a live cell with more than 3 dies (overpopulation), and a dead cell with
exactly 3 live neighbors becomes alive (reproduction). The entire grid updates at
once, from the previous generation's snapshot — no cell "sees" another cell's update
mid-step. There's no randomness after the initial seed and no central controller;
every visible pattern — still lifes, oscillators that blink in place, gliders that
crawl diagonally forever — is just this one local rule playing out in parallel across
thousands of cells, which is why Life is a favorite example of emergent complexity
from simple deterministic rules.