GOL-001 · technical companion
Standard Life
Conway's original B3/S23 rule is the collection's reference point: familiar enough to enter immediately, but inexhaustible once it starts moving.
At a glance
- geometry
- Square lattice
- neighborhood
- Moore · 8 adjacent cells
- states
- Dead / alive
- update
- Synchronous generations
- renderer
- Canvas 2D
What to explore
The game should make ordinary Life immediately playable and provide a truthful comparison control for every later experiment. A successful implementation is not merely a B3/S23 loop: it must expose stable patterns, long-lived growth, seeded fields, boundary behavior, direct editing, and the collection's shared transport and navigation language without obscuring the field.
Rules, update order and replay
The world is a square binary lattice stored as a Uint8Array. Every Step reads
one frozen board, counts the eight-cell Moore neighborhood, and commits one
synchronous generation. A dead cell is born at three neighbors; a living cell
survives at two or three. Boundaries are either finite or toroidal. There is no
hidden causal state and evolution makes no random calls. Exact replay requires
the selected initial condition or the random seed and density, field size,
boundary mode, and current occupancy. Reset reconstructs the selected start and
returns the generation counter to zero.
Reading the simulation
The renderer uses the collection's dead/alive palette and a focusable Canvas 2D stage. Written context states the B3/S23 rule, field dimensions, topology, keyboard behavior, generation, and population so color is not the only explanation. Direct pointer and keyboard editing is appropriate because no hidden state needs to be reconciled. A selected-cell causal inspector is not needed for this transparent reference rule.
Reproduce an opening
Download the example above, open the simulation, expand the controls, then use Share & reproduce → Import JSON. The example uses authored rules and a fixed seeded starting field; it is independent of the site’s editable default composition. Import starts paused at Step zero.
Share links and JSON reproduce the configured starting conditions, including hidden layers rebuilt by Reset. They do not save an evolved board, hand-painted cells, speed or display preferences. Determinism applies to the same rule version and Step sequence; real-time playback rates vary by device.
Larger fields and more involved rules can reduce playback speed. Read the configuration format and automated-access guide for compatibility details.