Conway's Game of Life Screensaver_

Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised in 1970 by the British mathematician John Horton Conway. It is a zero-player game played on a grid of cells that are either alive or dead. Each generation, every cell's next state is decided by simple rules based on how many of its eight neighbours are alive. From these trivial rules, astonishingly complex and lifelike patterns emerge. This tool runs it in your browser using HTML5 Canvas — no plugins or downloads needed.

The classic rules are written B3/S23: a dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbours becomes alive (birth), and a living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbours survives. Every other living cell dies — from under-population (fewer than 2 neighbours) or overcrowding (more than 3). This screensaver also includes HighLife (B36/S23) and a Maze rule (B3/S12345) as presets.

Press F or click Enter Fullscreen in the sidebar. The simulation will fill your entire screen. Move your mouse to reveal the exit button, or press Escape to return to normal view. Because clicking on the grid draws cells, use the button or the F key to go fullscreen rather than clicking the canvas.

Yes. Click and drag anywhere on the grid to bring cells to life, then watch them evolve under the rules. Use Clear Grid to start from an empty board and design your own seeds, or Randomize to fill the grid with a fresh random soup at your chosen density. Step Once advances a single generation so you can study the rules frame by frame.

Six presets: Classic (random soup, B3/S23), Gliders (a field of travelling gliders), Pulsars (period-3 oscillators), Glider Gun (the Gosper glider gun firing an endless stream of gliders), Maze (the B3/S12345 rule that freezes into maze-like corridors), and HighLife (the B36/S23 rule famous for self-replication). Press keys 1–6 to switch instantly.

The Gosper glider gun, discovered by Bill Gosper in 1970, was the first known Life pattern with unbounded growth. It is a stable structure that periodically emits gliders forever, which proved patterns in Life can grow without limit and helped show the Game of Life is Turing-complete. Select the Glider Gun preset to watch it fire a continuous stream of gliders.

The Glow slider adds a bloom halo around living cells using canvas shadow blur for a neon look. The Trail slider leaves a fading afterimage where cells have recently died, so you can see the motion and history of a pattern. Set both low for a crisp classic grid, or high for an ambient, glowing display.

Yes. Choose from 9 preset color swatches (green, cyan, red, orange, purple, white, gold, blue, lime), enable color by age for cells that shift hue the longer they survive, or use the custom color picker to enter any hex color. Changes apply instantly to the live simulation.

No. This Game of Life screensaver runs entirely in your browser using HTML5 Canvas. There is nothing to download or install. It works on any modern browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.

Yes, completely free. No account, no ads, no watermark. It is one of 139 free browser-based tools at jasperbernaers.com.