life

Conway's Game of Life with the rules pried open. You choose which neighbour counts cause birth and survival, and the neighbourhood itself is a tile you draw rather than the usual fixed eight cells. The run is watched as it goes: when the board dies, settles, or falls into a loop, it says so and gives the period. The last 512 generations are kept, so you can scrub back and fork a different history.

Playing

• Run, pause, or step a generation at a time; jump to the start or end of the timeline.
• Drag on the board while paused to flip cells on and off.
• Start from a glider, a pulsar, a pentomino, random soup, a blank board, or a tiled seed pattern.
• Toggle the birth and survival counts by hand, or fill them from evens, odds, primes or Fibonacci.
• Board size, speed, edge wrapping, and the two colors are all adjustable.