Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player automaton on an infinite grid of cells. Each generation, every cell lives, dies, or is born based on a count of its eight neighbors. Those four rules — and nothing else — produce gliders, oscillators, spaceships, and even patterns that compute.

Rules

For every cell at each tick:

• A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors survives.
• A live cell with fewer than 2 or more than 3 dies (underpopulation / overcrowding).
• A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors becomes alive.

That's it. In Life notation: B3/S23.

This visualization

The grid here is toroidal — edges wrap, so gliders travel forever instead of dying at a boundary. Cells are age-tinted: freshly-born cells glow lime-green, and the color cools toward blue the longer a cell survives. Stable structures tend toward blue; chaotic fronts stay green.

The pattern selector seeds a few of the most famous configurations:

• Glider — the smallest spaceship; moves diagonally, 4 generations per step.
• Blinker — a period-2 oscillator. Three cells in a row flip to a column and back.
• Pulsar — period-3 oscillator, one of the most common larger oscillators.
• Lightweight spaceship (LWSS) — moves horizontally, twice as fast as a glider.
• Gosper glider gun — first known pattern with unbounded growth. Emits a glider every 30 generations.
• R-pentomino — five cells of pure chaos. Doesn't stabilize for 1103 generations.
• Acorn — seven cells that take 5206 generations to stabilize into 633 live cells plus 13 escaping gliders.

Tech

• Two Uint8Array buffers are swapped each generation to avoid per-frame allocation.
• A parallel Uint16Array tracks cell age for color interpolation.
• Neighbor lookup uses (i + n + N) % N for wraparound on both axes.
• A single requestAnimationFrame loop with an accumulator advances as many generations as the target speed demands, independent of frame rate.
• A ResizeObserver recomputes grid dimensions from container size ÷ cell size and re-seeds the current pattern centered.