About Game of Life Lab
This site is for the moment when a Life pattern name is not enough. You can read the rule, run the pattern, pause the board, and check the facts on the same page.
Conway's Game of Life runs on one compact rule, usually written as B3/S23: dead cells are born with exactly three live neighbors, and live cells survive with two or three. The fastest way to understand that rule is to run a blinker, step twice, and watch the vertical line become horizontal and return.
From there, try a block for stability, a pulsar for period 3, a glider for motion, and the R-pentomino for a tiny seed that takes 1,103 generations to settle.
Pattern pages are written for practical checks: cell count, bounding box, period or lifespan, movement, final state, and what to watch in the simulator. If you searched for “3x3 methuselah,” the useful answer is the R-pentomino: five cells in a 3 x 3 box, 1,103 generations, 116 final cells, and 6 escaping gliders.
If you searched for “Gosper glider gun period,” the useful check is different: run the gun to generation 30 and compare the core after a glider has left.
The library starts with the objects people usually meet first: still lifes, oscillators, spaceships, methuselahs, guns, and growth patterns. Each group gives you a different question to ask of the board.
Still lifes ask why nothing changes. Oscillators ask when the phase returns. Spaceships ask how a finite object moves. Methuselahs ask how a small seed can stay active for hundreds or thousands of generations. Guns ask how a finite pattern can keep producing moving signals.
Game of Life Lab is meant to make the first observation readable. It is not a replacement for every Life tool. When you need huge universes, long jumps through time, scripting, or exact file workflows, Golly and LifeWiki become the better next step.
That handoff is intentional. The articles explain the concept, the pattern pages let you run a small canonical example, and the source links point to the community references when you want RLE files, deeper history, or more technical detail.
Start here