Three rules. That's the whole game.
Every square on the grid is a cell that is either alive or dead. Each cell looks at its eight neighbors, and the whole grid updates at once:
Birth
A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors comes to life.
Survival
A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbors stays alive.
Death
Any other cell dies — too lonely, or too crowded.
Try the rules yourself
Tap the outer squares to add or remove neighbors. The dashed gold cell in the middle shows you its fate.
A universe from three rules
Despite its staggering simplicity, the Game of Life is Turing complete — given enough time and space, it can compute anything a computer can. Nobody designs the outcome. Complexity simply emerges from local interactions.
Over fifty years, explorers of this universe have discovered a whole zoo of creatures. Tap one to watch it live:
Still Lifes
Frozen shapes that never change. They turn gold on the grid.
Oscillators
Patterns that blink in a perfect loop, forever.
Spaceships
Shapes that rebuild themselves one step over — so they fly.
Guns
Machines that fire an endless stream of gliders.
Methuselahs
Tiny seeds that erupt into chaos for hundreds of generations.
The Acorn
Seven cells that take 5,206 generations to settle down.
Why it matters
The Game of Life proves that spectacular complexity does not require complex rules. Simple local interactions can scale into rich global behavior — an idea at the heart of biology, neuroscience, economics, and distributed computing. If three rules can build spaceships, what can billions of neurons build?