This is a minimal, mobile-friendly implementation of Conway's Game of Life — a zero-player cellular automaton invented by mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970.
The grid is effectively infinite: cells are stored sparsely so you can zoom out to a single pixel per cell or in until only a 9×9 window is visible, and pan freely.
A short history
Conway devised the rules in 1970 at the University of Cambridge, tuning them with a board, a Go set, and a pot of tea until the smallest possible rulebook produced the richest possible behaviour. The game reached a global audience through Martin Gardner's October 1970 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American, and readers reportedly burned so many mainframe cycles hunting for new patterns that at least one company banned it during working hours.
Conway had quietly offered a $50 prize for anyone who could prove whether a pattern could grow forever. Within weeks, an MIT group led by Bill Gosper found the glider gun — a small oscillator that spits out gliders endlessly — and collected the cheque. That single discovery turned Life from a curiosity into a genuine mathematical playground.
Why it matters
Despite its four-line rulebook, Life is Turing complete: people have built working logic gates, memory cells, clocks, and even a full Life-inside-Life metapixel, letting the Game of Life simulate itself. It's a favourite example of how staggering complexity — computation, self- replication, unpredictable behaviour — can emerge from a handful of local rules with no central planner.
Conway himself had mixed feelings: he joked that Life had eclipsed his serious work in group theory and knot theory. He passed away in April 2020, and the patterns he inspired are still being catalogued today.
Features
- Draw cells by tap or drag.
- Pinch or use +/− to zoom, drag to pan, center button returns home.
- Play / pause and adjustable speed.
- Save patterns locally (guests) or to your account.
- Publish patterns to the public library.
- Share any state as a URL.
- Script the grid with JavaScript in a sandboxed worker.
Credits
The seeded library includes classic public-domain patterns (Glider, Blinker, Pulsar, Gosper glider gun, and more) — mathematical constructions that belong to the wider community.
Built as a small hobby project.