Conway's Game of Life

Drag on the board to draw living cells · Space plays and pauses

Playback

Speed 12 gen/s

Cell size 11 px

Grid lines Wrap at the edges Fading trails

Patterns

Pick one, then click the board to place it. These are the shapes people found in the first years of hunting.

The four rules

Brass marks a cell in its first generation; it deepens toward teal the longer it survives.

Keys

Space play / pause

→ one generation

R random fill

C clear the board

G grid lines

Esc stop placing

Devised by John Conway in 1970 and published that October in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column for Scientific American. Conway tested the rules by hand, moving stones on a Go board.