Mathematics · Study 049
Life, With Age
Conway's Game of Life on a wrapping grid, with newborn cells in gold and long-lived ones in grey-blue. Draw live cells with your pointer.
What you're looking at
Every cell is alive or dead and looks at its eight neighbours. A live cell with two or three live neighbours survives. A dead cell with exactly three comes alive. Everything else dies or stays dead. Colour shows age: gold cells were born in the last two generations, pale cells are settled, and grey-blue cells have survived a long time.
The idea behind it
John Conway devised the rules in 1970, looking for the simplest system that could behave unpredictably. It turned out to be capable of universal computation. People have built working clocks, calculators and even the Game of Life itself inside the Game of Life.
Try this
Move or drag the pointer to scatter live cells and stir up a quiet region.
