Conway's game of life

Life was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970. The game of life is an especially simple set of cellular automata rules. While the rules are simple, the results can be very complex. Conway choose the rules carefully after trying many other possibilities, some of which caused the cells to die too fast and others which caused too many cells to be born. Life balances these tendencies, making
it hard to tell whether a pattern will die out completely, form a stable population, or grow forever.

For more information, see Paul Callahan or David Epstein web sites.

You can also see some applets here : http://www.posi.net/software/automata/life.html

http://hensel.lifepatterns.net/

Download the model (zipfile, 7Ko)
For more information, contact the authors.