Conway's Game of Life — Interactive Cellular Automaton Simulation
Conway's Game of Life is a zero-player cellular automaton devised by mathematician John Conway in 1970. This implementation renders the simulation on an HTML5 canvas with adjustable grid size and simulation speed. Users can draw initial cell patterns by clicking or dragging, load classic preset patterns like Gliders, Gosper Gliders, and Still Lifes, and observe how complex emergent structures arise from four simple rules governing cell birth, survival, and death.
The four rules — a live cell with two or three neighbors survives, a dead cell with exactly three neighbors becomes alive, and all other cells die or stay dead — are sufficient to produce self-replicating structures, oscillators, and even Turing-complete computational patterns. The simulation demonstrates how local rules create global complexity, a central concept in complexity theory and artificial life research.
Keywords: Conway's Game of Life, cellular automaton, emergent complexity simulation, zero-player game, cellular automaton patterns, Glider pattern, artificial life simulation, complexity theory demo, self-organizing patterns, mathematical simulation browser