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Investigating · emergence

Conway's Game of Life

Can a grid of cells with two trivial birth/death rules produce moving creatures, oscillators, and even universal computation?

▶ Launch the interactive simulation

How the lab tests it

Each cell lives or dies by its eight neighbours (B3/S23): a live cell survives with 2 or 3 live neighbours, a dead cell is born with exactly 3. Seed the grid and watch what persists, moves, and self-reproduces.

What it looks for

open-ended emergence from two lines of rule — still lifes, blinking oscillators, gliders that travel across the grid, and guns that emit them. The Game of Life is Turing-complete (logic gates and a universal computer can be built from gliders), so its long-term fate is formally undecidable.

This is one world in the PHS lab — 91 interactive simulations, each posing a question and measuring the answer. See the catalogued findings.