# 2D Cellular Automata / Game of Life

**Track:** Physics, Motion & Emergence — Creative Coding — the existing 50
**Framework / surface:** p5.js
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** 1D Cellular Automata, Nested Loops & Grids

**In one line:** Local rules on a grid that produce lifelike emergence.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Extending the rule to a grid, where each cell consults its eight neighbors, yields John Conway's Game of Life—popularized by Martin Gardner in Scientific American in 1970. Two thresholds, one for birth and one for survival, are enough to produce a menagerie: blinkers that pulse, gliders that walk, guns that fire, configurations that compute. Nothing is choreographed; behavior is purely local, yet the board teems with what looks like ecology. The aesthetic is emergence as wonder—the irreducible gap between a rule one can state in a sentence and a world one cannot predict without running it. Life is the canonical demonstration that simple parts, multiplied, become genuinely surprising.