What is the Game of Life?

Conway's Game of Life, a cellular automaton, is a zero-player game, meaning that its evolution is determined by its initial state, requiring no further input. Read more about it on Wikipedia.

How do I play?

Initially, you start with an empty grid. You can toggle the state of each cell by clicking on it. A black cell is a living cell. If you keep the ALT key pressed, you can "draw" on the grid, toggling the state of several cells, instead of dragging the grid.

You can start (and pause) the game by either pressing the space key or the "Start game" button. In this state, the grid does not accept any input anymore. The computer performs a series of turns, until you pause the game or no cell is alive anymore. Which cell dies or becomes alive is determined by the following rules:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

What else do I have to know?

There are various settings whith which you can control the look and behaviour of the grid (see "Settings"). Initially, the grid is infinite (or as big as computationally possible (max range of integers in JavaScript)). By selecting "Wrap around", the top and bottom, and left and right side of the grid become connected. "Cell size" lets you control the size of the grid.

"Turns per second" determines how many turns are performed per second, i.e. how often the state of the cells is recomputed. You can always see in the upper right corner how many turns (generations) have been performed.

Your last game and its state is always stored locally in your browser when you leave this page

That's great, but...

If you have problems, suggestions, comments or just want to say "hi", write me to felix.kling at Gmail.

Please don't complain if you are not using the latest verison of Firefox or Chrome.

Where can I find the source code?

The code is available on Github.

Credits

This application makes use of:

• jQuery: http://jquery.com/
• jQuery UI: http://jqueryui.com/
• The PICOL icon library: http://www.picol.org/icon_library.php