John Conway's Game of Life

The Rules

The Game of Life was invented by John Conway (as you might have gathered). The game is played on a field of cells, each of which has eight neighbors (adjacent cells). A cell is either occupied (by an organism) or not. The rules for deriving a generation from the previous one are these:

John Conway

Neighbors 

• Death: 0,1,2 neighbors
• Life: 3,4 neighbors
• Death: 5,6,7,8 neighbors

Death

If an occupied cell has 0, 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 occupied neighbors, the organism dies (0, 1: of loneliness; 4 thru 8: of overcrowding).

Survival

If an occupied cell has two or three neighbors, the organism survives to the next generation.

Birth

If an unoccupied cell has three occupied neighbors, it becomes occupied.

Some DMOZ examples below 

from DMOZ.COM Link . . .

• Achim Flammenkamp's Game of Life Page – Collection of resources on Conway's Game of Life.
• Conway’s Game of Life – Explore Conway's Game Of Life in color on the WWW, by George Maydwell.
• Conway's Game of Life Java applet by Alan Hensel – A very fast Java applet that displays a collection of the greatest patterns ever created in Conway's Game of Life.
• 3D Game of Life – An animated 3D generalization of John Conway's Game of Life written in Java, with examples.
• David Ingalls Bell's Homepage – Articles on Conway's Game of Life and related Cellular Automata, free Unix software, archives of Life and other CA patterns.
• Dean Hickerson’s Game of Life page – A collection of Life patterns designed by the author.
• Eric's Treasure Trove of Life – Eric W. Weisstein's home page about Conway's Game of Life and related CA. Tutorial, information, patterns, links, references.
• Game of Life in Java – Java applet (with source) by Edwin Martin.
• Game of Life in Java – Java applet by David Laurent. Game of Life in colours or Black and White, many shapes