Conway’s Game of Life (aka Life) was a zero player game created by John Conway. The idea is to simulate life in a 2d grid with a set of simple rules:
- A live cell with less than 2 living neighbours dies.
- A live cell with 2 or 3 live neighbours survives.
- A live cell with 4+ live neighbours dies.
- A dead cell with 3 live neighbours comes back to life.
The Game
Figure 1: The game depicting a Gosper Glider Gun
The game can be found here. I built it in React over the course of the weekend, initially as a very simple game embedded in a basic web page, after which I redesigned the UI to look a bit more modern. The original version of the game can be found here.
There are a number of well-known named patterns that can be produced with the game, which give interesting results. A selection of these can be placed on the board from the patterns menu.
The Original Game
Here is a demo of my original design before I redesigned it.