Living Cells

Watch simple rules spark surprising life. Run Conway’s Game of Life fast or step-by-step, and explore iconic patterns like Acorn, Pulsar, and the Glider Gun.

A grid of tiny cells. A few simple rules. And suddenly… something that looks alive.

This app brings Conway’s Game of Life to your iPad so you can experience how complex behavior can emerge from incredibly simple logic. You’ll see stable forms, oscillators, and moving “creatures” appear, interact, and disappear—sometimes after hundreds of generations.

Explore famous patterns:

Jump straight into well-known, mind-bending setups, including:

• ACORN – a small seed that evolves for hundreds of generations
• PULSAR – a beautiful rhythmic oscillator
• GOSPER GLIDER GUN – a pattern that keeps producing gliders again and again

Control time:

Watch evolution unfold the way you want:

• Run the simulation at different speeds to observe long-term behavior
• Step generation-by-generation to understand how individual cells survive—or perish—based on the rules

A bit of history:

The Game of Life was created by John Horton Conway in 1970 and quickly became famous after Martin Gardner introduced it to a broad audience in Scientific American. Since then, it has inspired generations of curious minds—from math and computer science to artificial life and “emergence” research—because it demonstrates a powerful idea: simple rules can produce unexpected complexity.

If you’ve never played with the Game of Life before: prepare to lose track of time. If you have: welcome back. You’re going to want to try “just one more generation.”