← labtoy2026-09-07
Life
Conway's game, because every lab needs one. Paint cells, drop in a glider gun, and watch newborns age from yellow to blue.
Gosper's gun. Fires a glider every 30 generations, forever.
gen 0 · 36 alive
- newborn 1
- young 2–4
- settled 5–29
- old 30+
How it works
Nobody plays. You lay out a starting position, and from then on every cell looks at its eight neighbours and follows the same few rules, all at once, generation after generation.
Birth
A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes alive.
Survival
A live cell with two or three live neighbours stays alive.
Loneliness
A live cell with fewer than two neighbours dies.
Crowding
A live cell with more than three neighbours dies.
That is the entire rule set. Everything you see on the grid, the gliders, the guns, the shapes that explode and then settle, follows from these four cases and nothing else.
What to look for
- Still lifes
- Shapes that never change. A 2×2 block is the simplest. They turn blue once they have been around for thirty generations.
- Oscillators
- Shapes that cycle through a few states and come back. Three in a row is a blinker with period two. has period three.
- Spaceships
- Shapes that rebuild themselves a little further along. The is the famous one; the moves straight.
- Guns
- Oscillators that spit out a spaceship every cycle. The was the first proof that a pattern can grow without limit.
- Methuselahs
- Tiny seeds that take ages to settle. is seven cells and runs for 5206 generations; is five and runs for 1103. Both need more room than this grid to finish.
- Colour
- Colour is age, not kind. A glider is always yellow and coral because it is reborn every step, while a still life sits and turns green, then blue.
John Conway published it in 1970. It has since been shown to be Turing complete: you can build a computer out of gliders, if you have the patience. Wrap edges is on by default so spaceships come back around instead of dying at the border.