Playground · Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life
Four rules, no player, infinite variety. Each cell lives or dies based only on its eight neighbours — yet from that you get gliders, oscillators, and patterns that build other patterns. Draw some cells or drop in a preset, then hit play.
Click or drag to draw cells.
Gen 0 · Pop 0
Drop in:
The four rules
A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours survives; otherwise it dies (loneliness or
overcrowding). A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbours becomes alive. That's it —
devised by John Conway in 1970. It's a cellular automaton, and remarkably it's
Turing-complete: with the right pattern it can compute anything. Built in vanilla JS on a
<canvas> with a toroidal (wrap-around) grid.