SARATH THARAYIL
SARATH THARAYILHS.T.WRITEUPSWWRITEUPSCONCEPTSKCONCEPTSPROJECTSPPROJECTSLABLLABABOUTAABOUT
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/ SYSTEM

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← LAB

Conway's Game of Life

May 3, 2026

Conway's cellular automaton. Three rules applied to a grid. Pick a preset, draw your own cells, or seed randomly, then run it.

|PRESET
GEN0
ALIVE5

Paused. Click any cell to toggle it. Click PLAY to run.

60 × 30
/ NOTES
HOW IT WORKS

Every cell is alive or dead. A live cell with 2–3 live neighbors survives. A dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors is born. Everything else dies. Three rules applied simultaneously across the entire grid.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR
Still lifesBlocks and beehives that never change.
OscillatorsThe blinker flips every 2 steps. The pulsar cycles in 3.
GlidersTravel diagonally one cell every 4 generations.
Gosper GunFires a glider every 30 steps — unbounded growth.
THE BIGGER IDEA

Turing-complete. Given the right initial state it can simulate any computation. People have built CPUs, memory, and full copies of itself inside the grid.