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About the Applet

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Conway's Game of Life

A pop-up Java applet (see button, left) that displays a collection of the greatest patterns ever created in Conway's Game of Life.

Version 0.41d

New: When I first created this site over 10 years ago, I thought there would soon be tons of competition with Life applets like mine, or based on mine. But while there have been other Life pages, few can actually run patterns like "The Breeder" in the browser. This week, on May 9, 2009, I was informed of the first such site, by Nathaniel Johnston: ConwayLife.com. Unlike my applet, it's not ugly! But it is a work in progress, and still has some bugs. Be patient. In fact, as I write this, it's broken—the control panel doesn't show up, so there's no apparent way to start generating, and then the applet shows up on all of my browser tabs :-( ... but you can visit his very nice Life Wiki in the meantime. Nice work, Nathaniel!
What is the Game of Life? Beginners should visit Math.com's Life Page.

Life is rich in terminology. If you don't know the meaning of a word that you find here, I encourage you to look it up in Stephen Silver's Life Lexicon.

On a historical note, here is the original article from the October 1970 issue of Scientific American which introduced the game to the public.

Links for pattern hunters

If the patterns in this Life applet pique your interest, you can download the collection (lifebc.zip) here, or my somewhat larger lifep.zip collection, and view them with one of the programs listed below. Both collections are in the public domain.

Life Programs

Cross-platform:

Golly for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, by Andrew Trevorrow and Tom Rokicki. This is a great Game of Life program. It includes a regular mode, and a HashLife mode. And it's open source. Highly recommended, and still being actively developed.

Windows:

Life32 for Windows by Johan Bontes. This is a good Life program for Windows. It's extremely fast, powerful, and easy to use.

MCell for Windows by Mirek Wojtowicz. Very colorful, rich in features, and lets you play with rules you can't find in Life32 -- or most Life programs, for that matter. Relatively slow, but still recommended!

SARCASim by George Maydwell, also for Windows, is a more general-purpose cellular automata program. The acronym stands for "Super Animation-Reduction Cellular Automata Simulator".

glLife for Windows with Open-GL compatible graphics cards. Not really a full-featured Life program, and probably incompatible with many video cards out there, but a quick and flashy way to check out the patterns (which must be specified on the command line).

WinLife32 by John Harper.

DOS:

LIFE 1.06 by Al Hensel, for PC's running MS-DOS. This will run on just about any PC compatible still in existence. Requires 128K of memory. (Yes, I do mean K.) (Not compatible with the format of the "lifebc" collection.)

Macintosh OS/9:

LifeLab by Andrew Trevorrow, for the old Mac OS. Still a very powerful program. Autodetects gliders and oscillators, has sophisticated editing, does automated searches for new patterns.

Linux/Unix:

Xlife by Jon Bennett, for X window systems under Unix. A classic. Source code included.

GtkLife by Suzanne Britton, for *nix, should work as long as you have the GTK 1.2 libraries (which is a little back-dated). Open-source. Looks like the algorithm is based on my applet's, so it's probably a fast one.

Feel free to e-mail me with any questions, comments, bugs, or ideas. No, I will not help you with your school assignment, and I don't have any C/C++ source code for Life.

My e-mail address is:
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