John Conway's Game of Life

...with apologies to Eric Bina. Follow this link to a brief description of the rules and a pointer to some other implementations.

Warning: THIS IS NOT REALLY A GAME

This is not really a game. It is an implementation of a cellular automata that John H. Conway chose to call "The Game of Life." It simulates the birth, death, etc., of organisms based on certain rules.

If you like Tetris, you might find this amusing.

If you studied Computer Science, you might have heard of it. If you are currently studying Computer Science, you might be here looking for source code.

If you are expecting a game that you can win, this is not for you.

The reviewers at Point rated this a Top 5% Website back in 1995. Look for it in the "Math & Physics" and "Biology & Botany" categories.

The Game

You can choose from one of the following initial generations:

Blank
X (becomes stable)
Cross (becomes stable)
Glider
Diagonal Egg (stable pattern)
Exploder (large!)
Exploder (dies in the end)
r-Pentamino (courtesy of David C. Nelson)

Get the .

Caveats (from 1995)

In general ...

This (30-ish year old) implementation of John Conway's Game of Life uses checkboxes to represent cells. As grid size and generation count grow, so grows the number of checkboxes. If you have a 30-ish year old WWW client on a 30-ish year old computer, it may or may not take this well; the large number of checkboxes can make scrolling and redrawing very painful.

If you are a subscriber to GTE.net ...

I don't know why the GTE web site people decided to call this an action game. I didn't do it. I've tried to tell them otherwise. Please complain to them, not to me.

If you are easily bored ...

This game is slow, and you don't get to use any weapons. If your idea of a game is Mortal Kombat or Doom (or whatever kids play these days), then this probably isn't for you. Feel free to check out a few generations, but please don't expect it to be very interesting.
Stephen Stuart