Mathematics · Simulator 054
Each cell on the grid is alive or dead. Every tick, each cell counts its eight neighbours and follows a simple rule to live, die or be born. Draw patterns, press Play, and watch gliders crawl, oscillators blink and chaos settle, all from a rule that fits on one line.
Conway's Game of Life uses the rule B3/S23:
From these local rules, global structures emerge. Still lifes never change, oscillators repeat (the blinker has period 2), and spaceships such as the glider move across the grid (the glider travels one cell diagonally every 4 generations). Life is even Turing-complete: in principle it can compute anything a computer can.
Change the rule to explore other “life-like” automata: HighLife (B36/S23) has a self-replicator, Seeds (B2/S) explodes, and Day & Night (B3678/S34678) treats live and dead symmetrically. The grid wraps around at the edges (a torus).
Finite wrapped grid, so patterns that would grow forever eventually interact with themselves.
Under Life (B3/S23), what happens to a 2×2 block? To a straight line of 3 cells? Predict before drawing them.
The block is a still life: each live cell has exactly 3 live neighbours (survives), and no dead cell has exactly 3. The line of 3 is a blinker: the ends die, and the two cells beside the centre are born, so it flips between horizontal and vertical with period 2.