Life
Conway's rules on a wrapping grid. Click or drag to draw.
gen 0 · live 0
The rules
Every cell is alive or dead. Each generation, every cell looks at its eight neighbours and the whole grid updates at once:
- A live cell with two or three live neighbours stays alive.
- A live cell with fewer than two, or more than three, dies.
- A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive.
That is all of it. There are no players and no scoring — you set the first generation, and the rules run. John Conway published it in 1970; the interest is that three lines of arithmetic produce patterns that settle, blink forever, crawl across the grid, or never repeat at all. The board here wraps: the left edge neighbours the right, the top neighbours the bottom.
Draw a few cells and press start. A row of three blinks. Five cells in the right arrangement — a glider — walks diagonally and keeps walking.