Conway’s Game of Life is well known in programming circles. Abstractly, it’s a set of rules applied to a grid of boolean (either on or off) cells. On each iteration, the cells in the grid evaluate their neighbors and decide whether to turn on or off.

The demo above is a WebGL and CoffeeScript implementation of a generic cellular automaton, with some slight deviations to make it extra trippy.

While in the midst of the some new rigid-body physics experiments (a continuation from my previous post on Jakobsen-style position based dynamics: (http://labs.byhook.com/2010/02/11/fuzzy-physics-3-1-rigid-body-dynamics-pt-1/) , the hooplah around the iPad and Apple getting all ‘The Hills’ on Adobe provided a welcome excuse for trying something with a completely different perspective. With the tech world’s lips aflutter and teeth agnashing about HTML5 and it’s impact on the web, we decided to use a couple days between projects to dig in and see how we could translate our Flash awesomeness to something a little more worthy of having a lower case i before it.