3D Game of Life
Conway's Game of Life in three dimensions, free in your browser. Every cell in a box of up to 100 × 100 × 100 lives or dies by how many of its 26 neighbours are alive: 8 in its own layer, 9 in the layer above and 9 in the layer below. Pick a shape, press Run, and watch it grow, oscillate or die out.
Choose from 30 rules, among them Carter Bays' Life 4555 and Life 5766 and Softology's 445, Amoeba, Clouds and Coral, or write your own birth and survival counts, Generations rules included. Paint cells slice by slice, scrub back through the history, share a world as a link, and export it as STL, GLB or MagicaVoxel .vox. Runs on WebGPU or WebGL, with VR and AR where the browser supports them.
How to use
- Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, right-drag to pan. On a touch screen, drag to orbit and pinch to zoom.
- Space runs or pauses
- . steps forward, , steps back
- R restarts the pattern, N makes a new random one
- E edits cells one slice at a time
- H or ? lists every keyboard shortcut
About the rules
Rules are written in B/S notation: B lists the neighbour counts at which a dead cell is born, S the counts at which a live cell
survives, and every other cell dies or stays dead. The default rule here, B4-5/S4-6, means a cell is born with 4 or 5
live neighbours and survives with 4 to 6.
Conway's 2D rule, B3/S23, was tuned for 8 neighbours. With 26, a count of 3 is far too easy to reach and births
spread everywhere, so 3D rules need higher numbers. In 1987 Carter Bays searched for 3D rules that behave like Conway's and found
two: Life 4555 (B5/S4-5), which has a 10-cell glider of its own, and Life 5766 (B6/S5-7), in which a 2D
pattern copied onto two layers can play Conway's game.
From 2D to 3D goes through this step by step, with examples you can run.