Conway's Game of Life
The background of this site is a living Game of Life simulation. Three rules. Infinite complexity.
The rules
Each cell on an infinite grid is alive or dead. Every tick, it counts its eight neighbors:
- Birth. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes alive.
- Survival. A live cell with two or three live neighbors stays alive.
- Death. Everything else dies — loneliness or overcrowding.
No randomness. Every future state is determined by the initial configuration. Yet from this determinism emerges staggering complexity — stable structures, oscillators, gliders, and Turing-complete computation.
"It's known that the Game of Life is, in theory, universal — my conjecture is that it's universal in practice, that it can be made to do anything that any computer can do."
— John Horton Conway
Origin
John Conway devised the Game of Life in 1970, searching for a cellular automaton so unpredictable that no shortcut could forecast the outcome without running the simulation. He spent years adjusting rules by hand, playing out generations on a Go board, before arriving at these three. Martin Gardner introduced it in Scientific American that October, and it became an overnight sensation.
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