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The Game of Life is easy to describe and almost impossible to exhaust. These pages go from the four rules to the philosophy, and everything in between.
The rules of Life
Four sentences define the entire system. Work through a single generation cell by cell, with an interactive grid that shows you every neighbour count and what happens next.
Start herePattern encyclopaedia
Still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, guns, methuselahs, puffers and rakes. The vocabulary Life enthusiasts built to describe what they kept finding - with every specimen running live.
Browse the catalogueCellular automata
Life did not appear from nowhere. Stanisław Ulam's crystal growth models, von Neumann's self-replicating machine, Wolfram's 256 elementary rules, and the astonishing proof that Rule 110 is a universal computer.
Read the theoryVariants and other worlds
HighLife's replicator, Day & Night's symmetry, Seeds' refusal to stand still, and the automata that leave the square grid entirely - hexagonal worlds, continuous Lenia, differentiable neural automata.
Explore the variantsEmergence and implications
Why a five-cell glider is a serious philosophical problem. Emergence, reductionism, undecidability, digital physics, and the awkward question of whether determinism leaves room for anything else.
Follow the argumentJohn Horton Conway
Surreal numbers, the Monster group, the Look-and-Say sequence, the free will theorem - and the one thing he wished people would stop asking him about.
Read about ConwayReference