presets:speed:gen: 12
🧬 Conway's Game of Life — What's going on?
This is a "cellular automaton" — a grid of cells that are either alive or dead.
Every tick, the whole grid updates at once using just 4 rules:
1. A live cell with fewer than 2 live neighbors → dies (underpopulation)
2. A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors → survives
3. A live cell with more than 3 live neighbors → dies (overpopulation)
4. A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors → becomes alive (reproduction)
That's it. Four rules. Yet from these rules emerge:
- Stable shapes that never change (still lifes)
- Shapes that oscillate back and forth (oscillators like the blinker)
- Shapes that travel across the grid (spaceships like the glider)
- Machines that generate infinite gliders (the Glider Gun)
No one designed these behaviors — they emerge from the rules.
This is a foundational idea in complexity theory: simple local rules
can produce astonishingly complex global behavior.
Click or drag on the grid to draw cells. Use the controls to run it.