The Lab · John Conway, 1970

The Game of Life

A grid of cells, each alive or dead. Every tick, each cell looks at its eight neighbours and follows three rules. Nobody plays. Yet things crawl, blink, collide and build.

The rules

A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours lives on.
A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbours comes alive.
Every other cell dies, or stays dead.

All cells update at once. Each update is one generation.

Run it

Generations per second15

Start from

Picking one clears the grid and places it in the middle.

Random soup

How full25%

The grid

Cell size6 px

Zooming in crops cells off the edges.

Edges wrap around

With wrapping on, the grid behaves like the surface of a doughnut: walk off the right edge and you come back on the left. Turn it off and the edges become a wall of dead cells.

Show where cells just died

Click or drag on the grid to draw cells.