Conway's Game of Life

Conway was interested in a problem presented in the 1940s by mathematician John von Neumann, who attempted to find a hypothetical machine that could build copies of itself and succeeded when he found a mathematical model for such a machine with very complicated rules on a rectangular grid. The Game of Life emerged as Conway's successful attempt to drastically simplify von Neumann's ideas. The game made its first public appearance in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American, in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column. From a theoretical point of view, it is interesting because it has the power of a universal Turing machine: that is, anything that can be computed algorithmic-ally can be computed within Conway's Game of Life.

The rules of the game can be found all around the Internet. I have created a mesh of cells with randomly assigned values of alive or dead. Then iterated thorugh the mesh of cells and toggled according to the rules.

Snapshot:

Here is the source.

I could have easily thought about making this game of life in Javascript which would be like click on a few squares in the blog and just click play to see the result.. I thought that would be taxing on the minds so let this random generation be.