GtkLife is a fast, user-friendly implementation of Conway's Life: a form of artificial life developed by the mathematician John Conway.

Conway's Life is played on a square grid, where each cell is either alive or dead. The initial pattern "evolves" from generation to generation according to a few very simple rules: live cells with less than 2 or more than 3 neighbors (including diagonals) die, while dead cells with exactly 3 neighbors come to life. The results can be surprising: Conway's Life has self-organizing qualities, exhibiting a number of recurring themes. In addition, Life patterns can be constructed that have computational abilities, even to the point of Turing-completeness.

GtkLife features a highly-optimized Life algorithm, a giant universe size (1 million x 1 million cells), a modern user interface, and a clickable sidebar of bundled patterns. Users can explore the included patterns, as well as draw on the grid and see what they come up with on their own. Facilities are provided for zooming, traversing the grid in various ways, cutting and pasting blocks of cells, and running patterns at adjustable speed.

GtkLife will read and write multiple file formats in use among Life enthusiasts, including the popular RLE format.

License: free

Additional System Requirements: Gtk+ (1.2 or 2)