J.H. Conway's "Game of Life"

Set your intial condition and click to start, stop or reset.

The Game of Life was brought to the world's attention by Martin Gardner in the October 1970 edition of Scientific American. It is a cellular automata built on a rectangular array of cells which are either ``on'' or ``off''. The rules of state transition at each time-tick were originally laid down by Cambridge mathematician John Horton Conway. They are:

the cell will switch ``on'' if exactly three of its neighbours are ``on'';
the cell will not change if exactly two of its neighbours are ``on'';
the cell will switch ``off'' otherwise.

(See Complexification by John L. Casti, Abacus 1994.) The game is implemented here with periodic boundary conditions using HTML FORM element checkboxes.

If you haven't seen this before then yuou may care to know that two particularly stable initial conditions are:

and the so-called glider which ambles its way diagonally across the grid.