Conway's Game of Life: - Click 'run' to start the simulation; click 'pause' to pause it. When the game is paused, you can: - Click 'step' to step forward one generation. - Click 'clear' to clear all the cells. - Click 'randomize' to set each cell randomly. - Click on a cell to change it from blank to full or vice versa. - Click 'wrap' to make the edges wrap around to each other; click 'unwrap' to go back to the unwrapped state.
The Game of Life was invented by John Horton Conway and introduced in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column in the October, 1970 issue of Scientific American magazine. It is an example of a 'cellular automaton'. Each cell has two rules that depend on whether its eight neighbors are empty or full: An empty cell will become full if it has exactly three neighbors; a full cell will remain full if it has two or three neighbors. These simple rules can lead to complex behavior.
