The commons
One Game of Life board shared by everyone who loads this page: 192 by 108 cells on a torus, stepped 8 times a second on the server, persisted to disk, never reset. Click or drag to paint cells in your colour. You can only add life, never erase it, so the world cannot be vandalised.
Arm a stamp, then click the board to place it centred on that cell. With a keyboard: tab to the board and press Enter or Space to place the armed stamp at the centre of the world.
Census
live cells by colourWaiting for the first census.
How this world works
The rules are Conway's originals, B3/S23. A dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive; a live cell with two or three live neighbours survives; every other cell dies. The server steps the whole board 8 times a second and writes it to disk, so a restart resumes the world rather than resetting it.
The board is a torus: the right edge joins the left and the bottom joins the top. A glider never leaves; it orbits.
Cells carry colour. Each visitor is assigned one, and a newborn cell takes the majority colour of its three parents, so paint does not stay where you put it. It feeds into whatever it touches and your influence keeps spreading after your own cells are gone. Slate grey is the machine's own colour: everything the server seeds or injects itself is grey, which means every coloured cell on the board traces back to a person.
When the population stagnates into still lifes and short loops, the machine injects a little grey entropy to stir it up, so the world never dies. And because painting only ever adds cells, nothing you do can erase anyone else's work.
The same world renders in a terminal:
curl playground.shen.id/life.