Seed a live, evolving Game of Life board -- a random soup or a famous pattern like the Gosper Glider Gun -- then pause it, step it, speed it up, or draw your own cells.
Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Conway in 1970: a grid of cells that are either alive or dead, evolving in discrete generations under two rules. A living cell survives only with two or three living neighbours, and a dead cell comes alive with exactly three -- everything else dies of loneliness or overcrowding. From those two rules alone emerge gliders that travel, oscillators that pulse forever, and guns that fire endless streams of spaceships, which is why Life became the classic demonstration that vast complexity can grow from trivial laws. It is famously a zero-player game: you set the starting position, and the rules do the rest.
Every press seeds a live, evolving Game of Life board: a random soup that boils down into gliders, oscillators, and still lifes -- or one of eight famous named patterns, from the R-pentomino to the Gosper Glider Gun. The simulation runs right away, and the board is yours to touch: pause it, step it one generation at a time, change its speed, clear it, or draw your own cells with a click or a drag.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
It's the classic screen to stare at -- generating soups until one erupts into something unexpected. Teachers and students use it to demonstrate emergence and cellular automata; programmers meet it as a rite-of-passage exercise; pattern fans use the named seeds to finally watch the glider gun actually fire.
The board is a 64×44 grid whose edges wrap around (a torus), evolved under the standard B3/S23 rules: a dead cell with exactly three living neighbours is born, a living cell with two or three survives, and everything else dies. Random soups scatter cells with the site's cryptographically secure randomness at a density tuned to keep boards lively; famous patterns are placed from their textbook coordinates. Newly born cells flash in the site's purple before settling, so you can see each generation's change, not just its result.
Eight classics: a fleet of Gliders, the Lightweight Spaceship, the Pulsar and Pentadecathlon oscillators, the R-pentomino and Acorn (tiny seeds with enormous lifespans), Diehard (which vanishes completely after 130 generations), and the Gosper Glider Gun, the first pattern ever found that grows forever.
Yes -- click or drag on the board to toggle cells, while it's paused or even mid-run. Press Clear for an empty board and draw from scratch, then Play to set it loose.
Each generation, every cell counts its eight neighbours: a live cell with fewer than two dies of isolation, with two or three survives, with more than three dies of overcrowding -- and a dead cell with exactly three becomes alive. That's the whole game.
The grid is a torus: gliders leaving the right edge re-enter on the left instead of dying against a wall, so travelling patterns keep travelling and soups evolve as if the board had no edges at all.
Purple marks cells born in the current generation; they fade to cream as they age. It makes the direction of growth visible while the board churns.
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