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Alex Jacobs

Posted on Mar 19, 2019 • Edited on Oct 12, 2022

Conway's Game Of Life with different rules

#javascript #automation #opensource #react

Conway's Game Of Life

The Game of Life, also known simply as Life, is a cellular automaton devised by the British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970

If you've spent any time exploring or playing with Conway's Game Of Life, you're probably very familiar with resulting pattern such as:

But what if you could play with the settings that determine the rules for each turn, and could create patterns such as this?

Now you can!

Here is a deployed version of the project that is up and running that you can play with

I've created a game of life explorer using JavaScript that lets you change the rules.

The default rules are:

Death by overpopulation if neighbors are greater than 3
Death by under population if neighbors are less than 2
Rebirth by reproduction if neighbors exactly equal 3

I've also created simple editing tools that let you add or delete individual cells, play and pause during the evolution of the game, move your cells around on the game board, and also select random starting patterns. You can also change your initial board size, and of the millisecond delay between turns.

This allows you to make interesting starting patterns such as the following:
(scroll to 30 seconds to see the pattern get much more complex and interesting)