Time Cellular Automata — simple rules, living worlds

What is a cellular automaton?

A cellular automaton is a grid of little cells that are all either "on" or "off." Every step, each cell looks at its neighbors and follows one tiny rule to decide whether to be on or off next. Run that simple rule over and over and astonishingly complex, beautiful patterns appear — out of almost nothing.

This explorer has two modes. Elementary 1D shows Stephen Wolfram's famous 256 rules drawn as a "spacetime" triangle — try Rule 30 (chaos), Rule 90 (a Sierpiński triangle), or Rule 110 (powerful enough to compute anything). Game of Life is John Conway's classic 2D world where gliders fly and patterns breathe.

Everything runs right here in your browser — no library, no servers. Draw, run, pause, and play.

simple rules, living worlds

A tiny rule, applied to every cell at once, again and again — and structure blooms out of nothing. Explore Wolfram's 256 elementary rules drawn as glowing spacetime triangles, then flip to Conway's Game of Life and watch gliders fly. Draw, run, pause, and play.

Rule

Rule (0–255)

Famous rules

Each of the 8 boxes is one neighborhood (left–center–right). Click the gold/blue square below it to flip that cell's fate — the rule number updates live.

Setup & speed

Initial

Edges

Speed 22

Cell size 5px

Age fade cells fade from gold as they age

Patterns

Click or drag on the grid to draw living cells; drag over a live cell to erase. Then press Run.

Speed & scale

Speed 10

Cell size 12px

Generation 0 Living 0

Conway's rule: a living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbors survives; a dead cell with exactly 3 comes alive. Edges wrap.

For curious minds of every age

A cellular automaton is a grid of cells that all update together from a simple local rule — each cell just looks at its neighbors and decides to be on or off. Do that step after step, and tiny rules grow into snowflakes, triangles, gliders, and chaos. It is one of the most surprising ideas in all of math.

What is a cellular automaton?

Rule

Famous rules

Setup & speed

Patterns

Speed & scale

For curious minds of every age

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