The Game of Life.
A complete studio.

CGL Studio runs Conway's Game of Life at up to 60 generations a second. Explore 1,400+ catalogued patterns, seed new worlds from fourteen generators, draw your own or import an image, and read every run live.

Open the studio See it work

CGL STUDIORandomZooDrawingGuest ▾

iteration:0

stable after:-cycle period:-

Alive cells:36Dead cells:2862

alive variation (raw)0

alive cells (absolute)36

fps:20

Patterngosperglidergun

- Name: Gosper glider gun- Author: Bill Gosper- The first known gun and the first known finite pattern with unbounded growth.

The studio

Three modes. One live board.

Explore the catalogue, generate a world, or draw one — every mode runs on the same engine, measured live. Each card plays a real piece of the studio.

PulsarThe most common period 3 oscillator.John Conway

GliderThe smallest spaceship, travelling diagonally at c/4.Richard K. Guy

Lightweight spaceshipThe smallest orthogonal spaceship, at c/2.John Conway

PentadecathlonA period 15 oscillator, ten cells in a row to begin with.John Conway

PulsarThe most common period 3 oscillator.John Conway

GliderThe smallest spaceship, travelling diagonally at c/4.Richard K. Guy

The zoo1,400+ patterns from the ConwayLife archive, each with its author and its story.

iteration:0Alive cells:5

alive variation (raw)

alive cells (absolute)

iteration:0Alive cells:5

alive variation (raw)

alive cells (absolute)

Live telemetryThe generation, the population, its variation and its curve, at every step.

Sierpinski triangles ▾

Fourteen generatorsFrom Sierpinski triangles to Hilbert curves, each seeded and reproducible.

Uniform

Perlin

Clusters

Gradient

Edge bias

Center burst

Moiré

Marbling

Eight noise masksPerlin, moiré, marbling, edge bias — shaping where the cells fall.

PencilEraser

Drawing boardPencil and eraser on the grid, saved to your account.

Threshold:96

Image importAny picture turned into cells by Floyd–Steinberg dithering, at the threshold you set.

iteration:0cycle period:-Alive cells:48

Cycle detectionThe board recognises a state it has been in, and names the period.

01 — Explore

1,400 patterns, one search away

The zoo holds more than 1,400 patterns from the ConwayLife archive — guns, oscillators, spaceships, methuselahs — each with its author and its story. Search by name, open one, and it runs on the board at once.

Every card a live preview

Authors and notes from the archive

Favourites kept on your account

Patterngosperglidergun

- Name: Gosper glider gun- Author: Bill Gosper- The first known gun and the first known finite pattern with unbounded growth.

Patterns list (1,400+ patterns)

Gosper glider gunThe first known gun and the first known finite pattern with unbounded growth.Bill Gosper

PulsarThe most common period 3 oscillator.John Conway

Lightweight spaceshipThe smallest orthogonal spaceship, at c/2.John Conway

PentadecathlonA period 15 oscillator, ten cells in a row to begin with.John Conway

02 — Generate

Seed a new world in one click

Fourteen generators lay down a first generation — fractals, curves, waves, noise — shaped by eight masks and five settings. Every seed is reproducible, and every change cross-fades into the next.

Density, rotation, zoom and noise

A seed you can keep and replay

Twelve masked transitions between worlds

randomize parametersRandom shape type:Sierpinski triangles ▾

Density:100%

Rotation:0°

Zoom:×1.00

UniformPerlinClustersGradientEdge biasCenter burstMoiréMarbling

03 — Draw

Draw it, or import it

Lay cells down by hand, or drop in any picture: Floyd–Steinberg dithering turns its shades into living cells at the threshold you choose. Save the result to your account or export it as .hxf.

JPG, PNG, WebP, GIF, BMP and AVIF

A threshold from 0 to 255

Export and import in .hxf

drawn by hand

PencilEraser

Import Image

Threshold:64

Export to .hxfstart

Preview

The whole studio, live.

The studio's three modes, each running on its own board: the generators, the zoo and the drawing board.

Live simulation · runs in your browser

And the rest

Built for close study.

Hold the pointer over the board and a 4× box follows it, cell for cell, so a glider's phases or a gun's reflectors can be read as they happen.

A new pattern never cuts in: the board cross-fades cell by cell through one of twelve masked wipes — plasma, spiral, diamond, curtains, snakes and more.

Patterns travel as .hxf, plain JSON of comments and cells. Export a drawing to share it, import one to pick up where someone left off.

Sign in to keep your drawings and favourite patterns on your account, or carry on as a guest. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt.

Engine

Exact rules.
Real-time speed.

Every run is computed in the browser on Conway's standard rules, B3/S23, and every catalogued pattern comes from the community's own archive.

Two buffers, one torusThe current and the next generation in two Uint8Array buffers, the board wrapping at its edges.

Up to 60 generations a secondDrawn on Canvas 2D, the speed set anywhere from 0 to 60 FPS.

1,400+ archived patternsRead from the ConwayLife archive's files by a NestJS API on MySQL.

Tested on both sidesVitest on the .hxf and lexicon parsers, the zoo search and the router; the API's auth and catalogue too.