Proof of Life

Three rules. That's the whole machine: a lonely cell dies, a crowded cell dies, and an empty spot with exactly three neighbors comes to life. Everything else — the gliders that crawl across the world, the colonies that bloom and collapse, the patterns that pulse like a heartbeat — nobody wrote any of that. It happens.

This is Conway's Game of Life, the most famous thought experiment ever disguised as a toy. Mathematicians have argued for fifty years about what to call the things that emerge in it. Draw something. Let it run. When a shape survives, travels, repairs itself — notice the word your brain reaches for.

It's the first cartridge in the Playsistence arcade, and the smallest possible version of the question the whole site keeps asking.