Labs
Ten interactive worlds beyond Conway's Life, each with a simulator built for it specifically. They exist to make one point: Life's behaviour is remarkable, but it is not the only remarkable thing simple rules and explicit assumptions can do. Six are ours.
Civic Ledger a country through generations
Turn a national argument into inspectable arithmetic. Follow established households, new arrivals and locally born descendants through childhood, work and retirement; then watch tax, support, services, borrowing and interest meet. Begin with an extreme fiscal stress test, change any premise, and see whether the conclusion survives.
Open the national ledgerCovenant births compete for parents
Begin with Conway's B3/S23 counts, then give every living cell a direction of attention and only two promises to spend. Possible births now compete for shared parents, and two of three must agree before a child appears. See the unrealised futures, repaint hidden intention, or remove the new rule and recover ordinary Life exactly without resetting the grid.
Enter the covenantBiofilm life in layers
Grow a microbial city whose inhabitants consume food, spend energy, build matrix, divide, inherit traits and mutate. Flow and diffusion turn one colony into many local worlds. Inspect individual organisms, pulse the culture with a growth-dependent antibiotic, and learn why tolerance is not the same as resistance.
Open the cultureImpossible Wind
A globe of tiny weather vanes tries to agree on one smooth wind. Topology will not let it. Irreducible defects become wandering storm eyes, igniting auroras whose collisions rewrite the rhythm of the atmosphere. Rotate the world in your hand, comb its currents, or strike it with light and watch the weather reorganise.
Enter the atmosphereAfterlight
Six-colour rays cross a hexagonal field. Opposing rays collide and turn; every collision flips one bit of memory in the hexagon beneath it, changing how the next collision will turn. No particle is ever created or destroyed and no information is erased, so the whole luminous tapestry can be run perfectly backward.
Enter AfterlightAntiot's Field
Conway's Life played on ground that can be exhausted. Every living cell grazes the square beneath it, and empty ground recovers slowly — so a still life eats its own patch and starves. Standing still is fatal. Run a random soup for long enough and the rule strips out everything that cannot move, leaving nothing but gliders circling an empty field.
Run our ruleElementary cellular automata
A single row of cells, each looking at itself and its two neighbours. There are exactly 256 possible rules and you can flip through all of them. Rule 30 generates randomness good enough to have shipped in commercial software; Rule 110 is a proven universal computer.
Open the explorerLangton's Ant
One ant walks a grid. On a white square it turns right; on a black square it turns left; either way it flips the square behind it. For ten thousand steps the result is chaos. Then, without warning, it builds a perfectly straight highway and never stops. Nobody has proved it must.
Watch it happenBrian's Brain
Add one state to Life and forbid anything from surviving: every firing cell must spend a generation dying before its square can be used again. The result is a world with almost no stationary objects - everything either travels or disappears.
Run the brainWireWorld
An automaton designed backwards from the answer. Empty space, copper wire, electron heads and electron tails - and one rule that makes electricity behave itself. People have built adders, displays and a working prime sieve out of it.
Build a circuitWhy these ten
Between them they cover the ways you can change a cellular automaton and get something genuinely different: reduce the dimensions (elementary), replace the field with an agent (Langton), add states (Brian's Brain), design the rule backwards from an application (WireWorld) — or give the grid itself a state the cells depend on, which is what Antiot's Field does. Afterlight adds the missing counterexample: a conservative world where nothing is born, nothing dies and every generation has exactly one predecessor. Finally, Impossible Wind changes the geometry itself: its neighbourhoods live on a closed curved surface, where global topology prevents the locally preferred order from becoming perfect. Biofilm crosses one more boundary: it couples diffusing chemical fields to individual, inheriting organisms on a fine lattice, so a rule-made world can teach spatial ecology without pretending to be a clinical or molecular replica. And Covenant returns to Conway's own square grid but couples events that Life judges independently: eligible births compete for limited support from their shared parents, making unrealised futures part of the system you can see and manipulate. Civic Ledger steps beyond cellular automata while keeping the site's central discipline: state every rule, expose every consequential assumption, and let the visitor change one cause at a time. Its cells are equal population shares rather than organisms, and its emergence comes from demographic and fiscal stocks accumulating across generations.
For the full survey - hexagonal lattices, Larger than Life, SmoothLife, Lenia, neural cellular automata and three-dimensional rules - see variants and other worlds.