Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life: every cell lives or dies by counting its eight neighbours. From those tiny rules come gliders that travel, guns that shoot, and patterns that grow for thousands of generations. Draw your own, place famous patterns, change the rules and share them as RLE.
Population
live cells births deathsSpace play/pause · N step · R rotate pattern · scroll to zoom · F full screen
Pick a pattern, then click on the grid to place it. Press R to rotate and M to mirror before placing.
Load a famous experiment. It replaces the grid.
B lists the neighbour counts that give birth, S the counts that let a cell survive. Life is B3/S23.
Look
RLE (pattern text)
Place RLE puts the pattern in the middle (or switch to the Pattern tool to click where it goes). Files are read on your device.
Export
How the Game of Life works
- The world is a grid of cells, each alive or dead. Every generation, all cells update at the same time.
- Each cell counts its 8 neighbours. With Conway's rule (B3/S23) a dead cell with 3 live neighbours is born, a live cell with 2 or 3 survives, and every other cell dies or stays dead.
- Still lifes never change, oscillators repeat, spaceships move, guns emit spaceships and methuselahs evolve for a long time before settling. The simulator tells you when the whole grid starts repeating.
Invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970. Everything runs in your browser.
Using Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life: a grid of cells that live or die by simple neighbour rules. Draw cells, place famous patterns like gliders, spaceships and guns, change the rules, and watch complex life-like behaviour appear.
- Draw live cells with the mouse (right-click or Shift to erase), or press Random.
- Pick a pattern such as Glider, Gosper glider gun or Pulsar and click to place it. R rotates it.
- Press Play, change the speed, or step one generation at a time with N.
- Choose other rules — HighLife, Seeds, Day & Night, Maze — or type your own in B/S notation.
- Import or export patterns in the standard RLE format and download population data as CSV.
Example
Glider: five cells that move diagonally forever, one cell every four generations. Gosper glider gun: a pattern that shoots a new glider every 30 generations — the population grows without limit.
Questions & answers
What are the rules of the Game of Life?
A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbours is born. A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours survives; otherwise it dies. In rule notation this is B3/S23.
What is a glider?
A small pattern that repeats its shape every 4 generations while moving one cell diagonally. Gliders can carry information, which makes Life Turing-complete.
What is RLE?
Run Length Encoded text is the standard way to share Life patterns (used by LifeWiki and Golly). Paste RLE to import a pattern, or export yours.
What do other rules do?
HighLife (B36/S23) has a replicator, Seeds (B2/S) explodes, Day & Night (B3678/S34678) treats live and dead symmetrically, Maze (B3/S12345) grows corridors.
Does the grid wrap around?
By default the edges wrap (a torus), so patterns leaving one side return on the other. You can switch to fixed dead edges.
Why does the pattern stop changing?
Many patterns settle into still lifes and oscillators. The simulator detects when the whole grid repeats and tells you the period.
Is my pattern uploaded?
No. Everything runs in your browser; RLE files are read locally.
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