The EJS Game of Life Model simulates a popular 2D cellular automata of a lattice in a finite state which is updated in accordance with a set of nearby-neighbor rules. The universe of the Game of Life, developed by John Conway, is a two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead. Every cell interacts with its eight neighbors to determine if it will live or die (generally when there are too many live neighbors or not enough live neighbors) in the next time step. You can clear the lattice, design initial configurations (click on a cell to toggle between dead/live), and change the lattice size.

Ejs Game of Life model was created using the Easy Java Simulations (Ejs) modeling tool.  It is distributed as a ready-to-run (compiled) Java archive.  Double clicking the ejs_ms_explicit_GameOfLife.jar file will run the program if Java is installed.  Ejs is a part of the Open Source Physics Project and is designed to make it easier to access, modify, and generate computer models.  Additional Ejs models are available.  They can be found by searching ComPADRE for Open Source Physics, OSP, or Ejs.

Please note that this resource requires at least version 1.5 of Java (JRE).