Conway's Game of Life is the most famous cellular automaton, and this one runs live in your browser. Click or drag on the grid to draw cells, drop in a glider gun or a pulsar, then press play and watch complex patterns grow from just four rules. Nothing is uploaded — it all runs on your device.
You are in the Physics lab.
Population vs. generation — watch the colony boom, bust or settle into a steady value.
What the grid, the readouts and the population sparkline are telling you.
Every generation, each cell counts its eight neighbours and follows one rule, written B3/S23: a dead cell is born with exactly 3 live neighbours, and a live cell survives with 2 or 3 — anything less starves, anything more is overcrowded. The Births and Deaths readouts show exactly how many cells each side of that rule flipped in the last step.
From that one rule three families emerge. Still-lifes (like a block) sit with births = deaths = 0 forever. Oscillators (like the pulsar) cycle through a fixed loop, so births and deaths rise and fall in step. Spaceships (like the glider or LWSS) hold their shape while translating across the toroidal grid, reappearing on the far edge.
Generation counts the steps taken; Population is the current number of live cells (the same value the overlay shows on the grid). The sparkline plots that population against the generation number, so you can see a random soup crash and settle, an oscillator hold a flat line, or a glider gun climb without ever settling down.
A zero-player game invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970.
Load a one-click pattern — Glider gun, Pulsar, LWSS or Random — pick any preset from the menu, or click and drag on the grid to draw your own live cells. The grid is toroidal: patterns that leave one edge reappear on the opposite side.
Each generation every cell is updated at once from its eight neighbours under the B3/S23 rule: born with exactly 3, survives with 2 or 3, otherwise dead. Use Step to advance a single generation and read the births and deaths it produced.
Press Play and set the speed. Follow the live readouts and the population sparkline, and look for still-lifes that never change, oscillators that blink, and spaceships that crawl across the grid.
<iframe> on your own site. It loads the same simulation script as this page, with the surrounding page furniture stripped away. It runs entirely client-side with no tracking.Teaching or blogging about physics? You can embed this on your own site free — one line of code, no sign-up.
A ready-to-assign lab using the simulation above. Free to use — nothing to install or sign up for, and no student data leaves the browser.
Classify each pattern you try as still life, oscillator, or spaceship, and note what emerges from random starts.
Conway’s Game of Life evolves a grid by simple neighbor rules (survive on 2–3, born on 3). From these emerge still lifes, oscillators, and moving gliders — a classic demonstration of how simple deterministic rules produce complex, emergent behavior.
Educators: link or embed this simulation freely in your LMS or course guide.
Put the Conway's Game of Life on your own page — free, no sign-up, no watermark. It runs entirely in your visitors' browsers. Copy the snippet and paste it into your page's HTML.