OneTaskBy Tim King · Updated
Game of Life Online
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How the Game Of Life works
This Game of Life online version runs Conway's rules. Press Play and a random soup of cells settles over a few hundred generations into still lifes, blinkers and the occasional glider crossing the screen. Change the cell size for a bigger grid, the starting density for a thicker or thinner soup, and the speed to watch a generation at a time or let it race. Restart rolls a new random start.
Game of life online: what to know first
The Game of Life is John Conway's 1970 cellular automaton, and the rule fits in a sentence. Each cell on a grid is alive or dead. Every generation, a live cell with two or three live neighbours stays alive, a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive, and every other cell dies or stays dead. That is all. From that rule come gliders that travel, guns that fire them, oscillators of every period, and — famously — a pattern that is itself a working computer.
Reading the screen. Each square is one cell; the counter in the rail shows the generation number and how many cells are alive. A random start at 30% density is the classic way to watch it, because it produces the maximum amount of activity before settling. After a few hundred generations most of the screen is either empty or frozen into blocks, beehives and loaves, with blinkers ticking in the gaps and now and then a glider drifting until it hits something.
The sliders. Cell size sets how many cells fit on the canvas; at 2 px you get a grid of several hundred thousand cells, which looks like static resolving into texture, and at 24 px you can follow individual cells. Starting density is the percentage of cells alive on restart. Very low densities die quickly, very high ones die in a single generation from overcrowding, and the range from 20% to 40% is where the long-running action is. Generations per second is a frame-rate cap; drop it to 1 or 2 to watch the rule act.
Edges. The grid wraps, so the top joins the bottom and the left joins the right. A glider that leaves the screen comes back on the other side rather than hitting a wall, which avoids the artefacts of a hard border and means a lone glider will circle forever.
Why people still care. Life is the simplest well-known system that is Turing complete, which means anything computable can be computed by an arrangement of its cells. It is the standard example in discussions of emergence and self-organisation, a favourite first project for programmers, and it just looks good. Going fullscreen on a spare monitor with a small cell size is a reasonable screensaver.
FAQ
Can I draw my own patterns?
This version is random-start only, tuned for watching. Drawing gliders and guns by hand needs an editor with pause, single-step and pattern libraries, which is a different tool; there are several dedicated Life editors that do it well, and they accept the standard RLE pattern format.
Why does it eventually stop changing?
Because a random soup almost always settles into a set of still lifes and short-period oscillators. Wrapping edges mean a glider can survive indefinitely, but it usually collides with something first. Press Restart for a fresh soup, or lower the density for a longer settling phase.
What is the fastest speed?
Sixty generations per second, or as fast as the browser can compute and draw the grid. With a small cell size on a large fullscreen canvas the computation is the limit and the real rate may be lower; the generation counter tells you the truth.
Does it use the exact Conway rule?
Yes: birth on three neighbours, survival on two or three, using the eight surrounding cells with the grid wrapped at the edges. This is the rule usually written B3/S23, and no other variants are offered.
See also: all Simulations & Screensavers tools, Images, Audio, Video & Screen, PDF, SVG, Generative Art, Chart Makers, 3D Model Viewers, Drawing Pads, Mockups & 3D Making, Diagram Makers, 3D Science, Tracker Music.
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