Pattern · Spaceship
The Glider
Five cells, one rule, and an object that travels forever. The glider is the smallest known "spaceship" in Conway's Game of Life — a pattern that translates across the grid, unchanged in shape, indefinitely.
How It Moves
Every 4 generations, the glider's 5 cells reappear in the exact same relative arrangement, shifted one cell diagonally. It isn't "moving" the way a sprite moves in a video game — every generation, the entire pattern is destroyed and rebuilt by Conway's B3/S23 rule from scratch, and it just so happens that this particular 5-cell shape regenerates itself offset by one cell each cycle. That coincidence is what makes it a spaceship instead of just another short-lived random pattern.
Why It Matters
The glider was one of the first patterns found, within weeks of John Conway publishing the Game of Life rules in 1970, and it settled an early open question: can anything in this system actually travel? Its existence also turned out to be foundational to nearly everything built in Life since — gliders are the "signal" that more complex engineered patterns (like the Gosper Glider Gun) use to carry information across the grid, the same way a wire carries a signal in a circuit. Without a stable, repeatable traveling pattern, none of the logic-gate and computer constructions later built inside Life would have been possible.
See It Live
Cellscape has the glider built in as a preset pattern. Open it pre-loaded and press play to watch it travel — try switching the rule afterward to see how few other Life-like rules produce a stable spaceship at all.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who discovered the glider?
The glider was found by Richard K. Guy in 1970, shortly after John Conway published the Game of Life rules — making it one of the first spaceships discovered in the system.
Why does the glider move diagonally instead of just dying out?
Its 5-cell shape happens to regenerate itself, shifted by one cell diagonally, every 4 generations under Conway's B3/S23 rule — a coincidence of the birth/survival counts that makes the pattern self-perpetuating and self-translating rather than static or short-lived.
How fast does a glider move?
One cell diagonally every 4 generations — commonly written as a speed of c/4 diagonal, where c is the fastest a signal can travel in the automaton (one cell per generation).
Read the full mechanics of Conway's Game of Life in the complete guide, or browse the full pattern & rule gallery.