Conway's Game of Life Screensaver_
What is Conway's Game of Life?
The rules (B3/S23)
Preset patterns
How to use as a screensaver
Keyboard shortcuts
Guide — watch life evolve in five steps
Pick a pattern, tune the look, then let it run full screen.
Classic, Gliders, Pulsars, Glider Gun, Maze or HighLife — or press 1 to 6.
Click and drag on the grid to add cells. C clears, G fills a random soup.
Speed, cell size and density sliders; Space pauses and N steps one generation.
9 colours or a custom one, colour-by-age, glow, and fading trails.
Press F or use the button (clicking the grid draws). Esc exits.
Rules and patterns
- B3
- A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbours is born
- S23
- A live cell with 2 or 3 neighbours survives
- else
- It dies: fewer than 2 (lonely) or more than 3 (crowded)
- B36/S23
- HighLife: also born with 6
- B3/S12345
- Maze: survives with 1–5, grows corridors
- still life
- Never changes: block, beehive
- oscillator
- Repeats: blinker (period 2), pulsar (period 3)
- spaceship
- Moves: the glider travels one cell diagonally every 4 generations
- gun
- Emits spaceships forever: Gosper gun, a glider every 30 generations
- F / Esc
- Full screen on / off
- Space · N
- Pause · step once
- G · C · R
- Random · clear · reset
- 1–6
- Presets
Conway’s Game of Life, explained
Conway’s Game of Life is a cellular automaton devised in 1970 by the British mathematician John Horton Conway and made famous by Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American that October. It is a zero-player game: you set the starting cells, and the rules decide everything after that. This page runs it live on an HTML5 canvas, so it works as a free screensaver in any browser.
How the rules work
The grid is made of cells that are alive or dead. Every generation, each cell counts its eight neighbours. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours comes to life; a live cell with two or three survives; every other live cell dies. That is the rule written B3/S23 (born with 3, survives with 2 or 3). Changing the numbers gives different worlds: HighLife (B36/S23) adds birth on six neighbours and is known for a self-replicating pattern, and the Maze rule (B3/S12345) lets cells survive almost anything, so a random soup hardens into corridors.
Still lifes, oscillators and spaceships
Most random starting soups settle within a few hundred to a few thousand generations into a scattering of still lifes (patterns that never change, like the 2×2 block), oscillators (patterns that repeat, like the three-cell blinker or the period-3 pulsar) and gliders, the smallest spaceship, which crawls diagonally across the grid forever.
The Gosper glider gun
Conway originally conjectured that no pattern could grow without limit. In November 1970 Bill Gosper proved him wrong with the glider gun, a stable machine that fires a new glider every 30 generations. Guns, and the gliders they produce, can be combined into logic gates — part of why the Game of Life is known to be Turing complete: in principle it can compute anything a computer can.
Glow, trails and colour by age
The Glow slider adds a soft bloom around living cells, and Trail leaves a fading afterimage where cells died, so movement becomes visible. Colour by age shifts the hue the longer a cell survives, which makes stable structures stand out from the churn.
Running it as a screensaver
Open the page on the screen you want, choose a preset and press F. Because clicking the grid draws cells, use the key or the button to go full screen. It works on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android in any current browser; a web page cannot register as your operating system’s screensaver, so full screen is the way to use it.
Free, no download
The simulator is free, with no account, no ads and nothing to install.