A cellular automaton is a grid of cells, each alive or dead. Every generation, each cell counts its eight neighbours and follows one simple rule expressed as B…/S… — a dead cell is born with B neighbours, a live cell survives with S neighbours, and otherwise it dies. Conway's Game of Life (B3/S23) is the famous 1970 original: three parents make a birth, two or three keep a cell alive, anything else is loneliness or crowding.
Built-in universes
| Rule |
Birth |
Survive |
Behaviour |
| Conway — Life | 3 | 2, 3 | The classic — chaotic yet stable, Turing-complete |
| HighLife | 3, 6 | 2, 3 | Like Conway, but with a self-replicating creature |
| Seeds | 2 | — | Nothing survives; every birth is a fresh explosion |
| Day & Night | 3, 6, 7, 8 | 3, 4, 6, 7, 8 | Perfectly symmetric between life and death |
| Maze | 3 | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 | Seeds grow into intricate labyrinth corridors |
| Mazectric | 3 | 1, 2, 3, 4 | Longer, straighter corridors than Maze |
| Coral | 3 | 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 | Slow, accretive growth like a coral reef |
| Anneal | 4, 6, 7, 8 | 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 | Domains coarsen and smooth out like annealing metal |
Pattern gallery
Spaceships
Glider (diagonal, c/4) and Lightweight Spaceship (horizontal, c/2) — shapes that travel forever across the grid.
Oscillators
Pulsar returns to its shape every 3 generations; the Pentadecathlon every 15.
Gosper Glider Gun
Bill Gosper's 1970 gun fires a new glider every 30 generations — the first proof that Life grows without limit.
Methuselahs
R-Pentomino (5 cells, 1,103 generations of chaos), Acorn (7 cells → 5,206 cells) and Diehard, which vanishes exactly at generation 130.
Infinite Growth
A 5×5 seed that escapes its bounding box forever — tiny input, unbounded output.
Colour = age
Newborn cells flash bright white, then settle into the theme colour as they survive generation after generation.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Key | Action |
|---|
| Space | Start / pause the simulation |
| S | Advance one generation |
| R | Random soup |
| C | Clear the universe |
| G | Toggle grid lines |
| W | Toggle wrap-around edges |
| I | Open this panel |