Tags: °bio

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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.

Grant Muller has written a music sequencer bank that plays live cells as notes.

Image: http://www.grantmuller.com/wp-content/uploads/screenshot.gif
http://grantmuller.com/projects/game-of-life/

It sounds very nice and avantgarde though it isn't quite what I hoped it would be. A cursor runs down the grid line by line and plays a note when it meets a live cell, instead of the live cells playing immediately all at once. Still interesting to check out.