Game of Life: Playground

The Game of Life is the cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Conway in 1970. Each cell lives or dies based only on how many of its eight neighbors are alive, yet these simple rules produce still lifes, blinking oscillators, spaceships that travel across the grid, and even guns that fire an endless stream of gliders. It is a classic introduction to complex systems, emergence and the theory of computation.

BUILT-IN PATTERN LIBRARY

- 736 famous patterns from the Life Lexicon, organized into still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, guns, puffers and rakes, methuselahs, and other structures

- Period, speed and size shown for every pattern, with search by name

- Load a glider, the Gosper glider gun or a spaceship with one tap

CREATE YOUR OWN

- Tap the grid to add or remove cells

- Set the grid width and height anywhere from 2 to 256

- Fill the grid at random, or clear it and start over

- Pinch to zoom and drag to pan for a closer look

CONTROL THE EVOLUTION

- Four speeds: 2, 4 and 10 generations per second, plus a 60-generations-per-second lightning mode

- Two boundaries: wrapping edges, where cells leaving one side return on the other, or fixed edges with empty space beyond

SAVE AND SHARE

- Keep your creations in My Patterns inside the app

- Open and save standard .cells pattern files to exchange them with other Life programs

PRIVATE BY DESIGN

- No ads, no account, no network access, no permissions, and no personal data collected

- Suitable for all ages, in the classroom or on your own

Built-in patterns are adapted from the Life Lexicon by Stephen A. Silver et al. and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).