Conway’s Game of Life
Four simple rules. Infinite complexity. Still astonishing after 55 years.
Simulate • Observe • Explore • Wonder
Three Ways Into the Game of Life
Launch a random population and watch rules take over, load hand-crafted patterns that travel and oscillate, or learn the story of the mathematician who set the whole thing in motion in 1970.
Play
Fill the grid randomly or draw your own cells. Hit Start and let the four rules take over. Patterns appear from nothing. Some survive; most don’t.
Play the GameExplore Structures
Load named classics — Gliders, Blinkers, Beehives — and observe their behavior. Some stay still. Some pulse. Some travel forever.
Explore PatternsAbout
Who was John Conway? What do four rules have to do with the theory of computation? The answers are more remarkable than the simulation.
Learn MoreWhy This Belongs in Every CS Course
Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton — a grid of cells following deterministic rules with no randomness once started. Despite four rules, it produces extraordinary complexity: moving structures, self-replicating forms, and configurations that compute. In 2002 it was proven Turing-complete: in theory, any computation a computer can perform can also be performed inside a GOL grid. From four rules. On a grid. With two cell states. That is emergence. That is why this matters.