Conway’s game of life is a no player game which means its evolution throughout the game is determined by its initial input and no further interaction is required. It was devised by Cambridge mathematician, John Horton Conway. The game became very popular when it was mentioned in an article published by Scientific American in 1970.

The algorithm which this game is based on is Turing complete meaning a system able to recognize or decide other data manipulation sets.

With just a few basic rules it can create vast and complex objects. Any number of different possible configurations can be used as the initial input, but one thing to note is that after a time, there might be nothing left on the board, or as in some cases, the configurations live forever.

There is no algorithmic way of telling which one of these will happen. It is able to make any arbitrarily complex configuration which could die off on the first and the thousand move, or the billionth.

Fun fact: John Conway used to say he hated the Game of Life. He felt the game overshadowed much more important things he worked on.

This implementation of the algorithm was created using React

More about the Game of Life here.

If you need more presets for the game, Alan Hensel did heck of a job of compiling an extensive glossary. You can find that here.