Emergence · cellular automata
A universe from four rules
Conway's Game of Life: every cell lives, dies or is born according to four rules about how many neighbours it has, and that is the entire specification. Gliders, blinkers and still lifes appear anyway. On the full demo, click and drag the grid to paint your own seed.
Research pillar · Games Informatics & Engagement Modelling
This interactive is an illustrative stand-in — a simplified model built to convey the idea and behaviour behind this research area for teaching. It is not a specific published method, dataset, or result.
How it works
The board wraps at every edge, so the world has no boundary. Each generation, a live cell with two or three live neighbours survives, a live cell with any other count dies, and a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours is born — that is all four rules. Structure is never designed in: gliders that walk across the grid, oscillators that beat on a fixed period, and still lifes that never change all fall out of those rules alone, which is why Life is the standard illustration of emergence. A board that dies out reseeds itself.
More demos
These illustrate the research areas behind my work — see the research pillars for the full picture, or the crowd-evacuation simulation for a demo built directly from published papers.