Conway's Game of Life

What you just saw

A cell comes alive if it has exactly three live neighbors. A live cell survives only with two or three. That's the whole rule set. From it you get still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, glider guns, and — if you arrange the cells carefully enough — Turing-complete computation. This simulator uses a toroidal grid (wraps at the edges) so patterns don't hit walls.

The science behind it

John Horton Conway invented the Game of Life in 1970 and Martin Gardner popularized it in Scientific American the same year. It was the first cellular automaton to capture the public imagination and is still actively studied: logic gates, memory cells, and universal Turing machines have all been built inside it. The Gosper glider gun (1970) was the first infinite-growth pattern and earned the first prize Conway offered.

Try these experiments

1. 1. Random soup

   Settings: preset=random density=0.3

   What to look for: A rapid die-off, then a slow settle to still lifes and oscillators.

2. 2. Single glider

   Settings: preset=glider

   What to look for: A five-cell pattern marches diagonally across the grid, wrapping at edges.

3. 3. Gosper glider gun

   Settings: preset=gun

   What to look for: A stable factory that emits a new glider every 30 steps, forever.

from scirouter import SciRouter
client = SciRouter(api_key="sk-sci-...")
result = client.simulation.run(
    model="game_of_life",
    params={"grid_size": 3000, "preset": "random", "density": 0.3},
    steps=5000, seed=42,
)