A little something that I hacked up this afternoon to get to grips with the new Canvas HTML element...

The Game of Life is the best-known example of a two-dimensional cellular automaton. It was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970 and has become a textbook demonstration of emergence: complex and counter-intuitive behavior arising from fundamentally simple rules and interactions. The Game of Life is based on just four simple and elegant rules, but the patterns it is capable of producing are far from trivial; indeed it has been shown to be capable of acting as a universal Turing machine.

I originally wrote this article for the Xaneon Development site way back in August 2005. After Xaneon shut down and this article became unavailable, a number of people e-mailed me to ask for it, so I dug up my local copy and decided to publish it here. Note that since this was written, Mambo has become Joomla and both Drupal and Joomla have evolved and come out with new releases. Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, here follows the article in its original form.