Choose Life. Choose Conway's Game of Life!

Conway's Game of Life is one of the earliest cellular-automata simulations. The mathematician John Horton Conway devised it in 1970. In the early days, games like this would have had to be played on graph paper. Computers made it possible to explore the strange new worlds created by squares winking on and off.

From a set of simple rules, a fascinating show of complex, almost lifelike patterns blooms in front of a viewer's eyes. You don't exactly play this game; rather, the game comes in applying rules that decide whether a square is dark ("alive") or blank ("dead") in the next round. There are only four rules. From Wikipedia:

• Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, as if by underpopulation.
• Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
• Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, as if by overpopulation.
• Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

This version of Conway's Game of Life lets you adjust the percentage of living cells at the beginning of the game; any value not between 0 and 100 will default to 50%. The highest and lowest percentages lead to stable board states very quickly; those somewhere in the middle can have very long lives. If the number of living cells hasn't changed in two generations, this game pauses. If you want, you can start the game back up and see if it springs back into continuing activity. Sometimes the number will change, but the board will have fallen into a stable, "oscillating" state of repeating patterns.