♫♫♫  Listen to John Conway's Game of Life!

Draw your initial pattern in white, representing the first generation of living cells, and then press the <Cycle> button below the applet to see/hear next generations of cells evolve. Each time that you press the <Cycle> button, a new generation is calculated. This can take several seconds during which nothing seems to happen.

The <Auto> button toggles automatic generation updating on and off. A difference with repeated use of the <Cycle> button is that is does not check for any changes that you may have drawn. This makes the calculations significantly faster, but you should use the <Cycle> button whenever you have drawn changes on the canvas. Depending on your browser, you may also need to hover your mouse pointer over the empty green border area around the black drawing canvas in order to see proper screen refreshes while the cell generations evolve.

You can also try and listen to William Gosper's glider gun or John Conway's R-pentomino...

The generation cycling rules of Conway's Game of Life are simple:

1. A living cell with less than two neighbors dies by loneliness.
2. A living cell with more than three neighbors dies by overcrowding.
3. A living cell with two or three neighbors just lives on.
4. A dead cell with exactly three neighbours becomes alive.

Note: Do not change the applet parameters, because in this simple implementation of Conway's Game of Life, various settings are hard-coded and assumed not to change.