Life Chess × Jev
Experimental Conway's Life game where Jev makes each move with one boolean per legal cell, plus a broker that wraps any LLM as Jev.
Overview
Life Chess x Jev is a web experiment for writing a new game ruleset and immediately watching it be played. Its first ruleset, 'The Chess of Life', is turn-based intervention on a Conway Game of Life board: before each evolution, a player flips one cell, with an asymmetric two-player mode where one side can only bring dead cells to life and the other can only kill live cells. Because nobody has played it before, there is no opening theory, and Jev serves as both a tool for exploring the rules and their first player.
Each move is one Jev request containing a boolean question for every legal cell (64 on an 8x8 board), with no heuristic fallback; a user-set confidence threshold flags unsure turns. Rules render from editable templates with auto-filled placeholders, so a designer can rewrite a rule and re-ask. A Jev-compatible broker wraps any OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible LLM as a Jev backend so both can play the same board, and latency, upstream calls and cost are first-class outputs for comparison. It is documented in Chinese and English, deployed on Vercel and GitHub Pages, and is a sister project of jev-2048.
What the decision model decides
| Type | Question | Answers |
|---|---|---|
| Yes / no | Should this cell be flipped this turn? (one per legal cell) | — |
How it works
- Choose or edit a ruleset rendered from templates
- For each turn, ask one boolean per legal cell in a single request
- Pick the move from the probabilities; flag low-confidence turns
- Board evolves under Life rules
- Compare Jev with an LLM via the broker
Strengths
- Shows parallel decisions in one request
- Editable rules make experiments quick
- Broker enables like-for-like LLM comparison
- Free trial backends on the live demo
Caveats
- Experimental game design
- No heuristic fallback by design
- Documentation primarily Chinese with an English README
Getting started
Play at https://jev-life.vercel.app (no key needed for the free trial backends).At a glance
- Type
- Project
- Status
- prototype
- Language
- TypeScript
- Runtime
- web app with serverless functions
- Has code
- yes
- Has tests
- yes
Use cases and integrations
How curated lists describe it
Experimental game design: a turn-based Conway board where each side's move is one Jev `Boolean` per legal cell in a single request, with no heuristic fallback and a user-set confidence threshold flagging unsure turns; the game is new, so there is no established play to copy, and its rules are not self-evident — they render from editable templates with auto-filled placeholders, so a designer can rewrite a rule and re-ask.
yibie/awesome-jev
Frequently asked questions
How does Jev choose a move?
It answers one boolean per legal cell in a single request, and the move comes from those probabilities.
Can an LLM play too?
Yes, through a broker that wraps OpenAI- or Anthropic-compatible models as a Jev backend.
Can I change the rules?
Yes, rules are editable templates.
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