Conway's Life activity

[Ross Andrews]

>  The logic to count the neighboring on-cells is end-user accessible,
> and it is packaged as well so that the user can even change that.
> (After all, I just wrote it while I was waiting for an appointment at
> a clinic.  That means anybody can just do it if you have an XO.)
>
>  You could write a script so that the you "paint" the picture of an
> initial state and set it.

Hmm, let me think back... I don't have a Windows machine any more, and  
I haven't played with Autocell since I was twelve, but I think it  
worked roughly like this:

A ruleset in Autocell was composed of multiple rules, each of which  
had a starting cell color, a set of neighbors, and an ending cell  
color. So Conway's life would be something like this:

Start: white
Neighbors: 3 black, 5 white
End: black

Start: black
Neighbors: 4 black, 4 any
End: white

Start: black
Neighbors: 7 white, 1 any
End: white

Anything that didn't match one of those rules would stay unchanged for  
the next generation, so a black with 3 black and 5 white neighbors  
would stay black.

Autocell supported multiple cell colors (up to 256 I think), but I'd  
like my activity to stay at two colors both for simplicity of rules  
and so it works better if the screen is monochrome.