Conway's Game of Life is a one-player "game". The game is played on a grid of cells. Each cell can be either dead (empty) or live (filled). The game
starts in some initial grid configuration. On each turn, for each cell, the number of its live neighbours is calculated.
The game rules state what happens to each cell, depending on the number of neigbhours it has.
The classical rules are 23/3 - meaning that a live cell survives, if it has 2 or 3 neighbours, otherwise it dies, and a dead cell becomes live if it has 3 neighbours - but of course you can change the standard rules.
The Applet
What makes this applet somewhat different from most Game of Life implementations, is the "combat" mode, where you can have two different kind of cells on the grid - Red and Black - both with their own rules.
You can use the mouse to draw the initial population on the canvas. In the combat mode, the left mouse button draws black cells, and the right mouse button draws red cells.
Feel free to alter the rules, you can get some rather interesting results: see some predefined settings in the applet.
(Press "Update Settings" after changing the rules.)
The source can be downloaded from
here. Note however, that it's a naive implementation, and highly unoptimized.