SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers. This rule is SmoothLifeL which supports many interesting phenomena such as gliders that can travel in any direction, rotating pairs of gliders, wickstretchers and the appearance of elastic tension in the 'cords' that join the blobs. http://sourceforge.net/projects/smoothlife/ Slides showing how the rule works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyTIXRhjXII Paper describing SmoothLife and SmoothLifeL: http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.1567 This animation created in Ready: http://code.google.com/p/reaction-diffusion More videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL69EDA11384365494&feature=plcp Original Google+ post: http://plus.google.com/110214848059767137292/posts/WtPBhYJswAe Details: Outer radius: 20.0 Radius ratio: 3.0 Birth range: 0.257 - 0.336 Survival range: 0.365 - 0.549 Alpha_n (outer sigmoid width): 0.028 Alpha_m (inner sigmoid width): 0.147 Timestep: 0.05 (Euler integration) Frames: 10819 (saving 1 image per 8 timesteps) Total time units elapsed: 4327.6 World size: 512x512, with toroidal wrap-around. Color representation: linear mapping of [0,1] onto [black,white] OpenCL source code: http://reaction-diffusion.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/Ready/Patterns/smoothlife_smoothlifeL.vti Computation time: 74 minutes on an nVidia GeForce GTX 460. That's in Ready. Stephan's software (at the sourceforge link above) runs much faster because it uses FFT.