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°bio
The Button starts a cellular automaton that plays
Conway's Game of Life by default, which works as follows:
If one of the orange cells has less than 2, or more than 3 neighbours, it dies. If it has 2 or 3 neighbours, nothing happens. A dead cell comes alive if it has 3 neighbours.
These simple rules applied to different seeding populations can create surprisingly complex emergent systems. The simplest moving pattern is a
glider, which was even proposed
as a universal hacker emblem by Eric S. Raymond, maintainer of the
Jargon File (among other things).
You can edit the seed or even the running simulation by painting into it, or you can load pre-set patterns (including a complete
Turing Machine) and you can change the rules to something else (The "Amazing"-ruleset creates nice labyrinthine patterns).
If you like this you may be interested to download
golly, a cellular automaton that runs on your computer and is therefore faster and can compute more complicated patterns and save your self created patterns.
This java applet was written by
Al Hensel. There's another cool game of life simulator at
http://conwaylife.com.