Conway's Game of Life

And second, a small, quick stable glider reflector named "Snark" was found by Mike Playle. It fits an a 17x23 box and has a recovery time of only 43 ticks. This has been a holy grail for years, because although there are oscillators that reflect gliders, restricting the timing of the input gliders to the period of an oscillator is a hassle, and fails to enable periods that would otherwise be available. (See GliderReflectorLoop.)

In updating this site for the first time in years, I have noticed that Java has become a real hassle in modern browsers. I apologize, but I simply do not have the time to update the website to take advantage of modern technologies (HTML5). If anyone out there would like to tackle that programming challenge, keep in mind that it doesn't count unless it can comfortably run the Breeder. I've done some googling, and have not found an HTML5 version of Life that lives up to the low standards set by this applet, although I know it is possible.

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.

• ConwayLife.com - a wiki and a forum, where the life enthusiasts hang out these days.
• H. Koenig's Game of Life News (in blog format, with an RSS feed)
  
• Jason Summers' Life Page - hundreds of patterns, and pretty well kept up to date.
  
• Stephen Silver's Life Page
  
• David Eppstein's Life Page
  
• David Bell's Life Page - for the spaceship enthusiast.
  
• Dean Hickerson's Life Page (defunct, but archived on Tom Rokicki's site)
  
• Paul Callahan's Life Page (also defunct, and archived on Tom Rokicki's site)

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

Okay, I'm done listing old programs. What you need is Golly for Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and iPad, 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.

Honorable mentions still go to:

MCell for Windows by Mirek Wojtowicz. Very colorful, rich in features. 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".