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Conway's Game of Life
Life
Explore Conway's Game of Life: a grid where four local rules create stable structures, oscillators, moving patterns, and long-lived surprises.
Watch four simple rules create persistent forms
Every cell responds only to its eight immediate neighbours, yet stable structures, oscillators, and moving patterns can emerge.
What to watch: cells disappear and reappear locally while larger patterns persist, oscillate, move, or eventually settle.
Explanatory notes
- B3 means a dead cell is born when exactly three of its eight neighbours are alive.
- S23 means a live cell survives when two or three neighbours are alive; otherwise it dies.
- Cells beyond the visible grid are treated as dead, so the canvas is a finite viewport approximation of Life's conceptually infinite grid.
- Pause the simulation to draw or erase cells. Resizing changes only the display, never the underlying grid state.