I programmed Conway's Game of Life when I was 15 as a quick summer project; it took me three hours to plan and finish developing, but it was a milestone in my programming ability because it gave me a deeper passion for simple-yet-elegant algorithms and rule sets.

The Game of Life works like this: on a 2-dimensional grid, a cell can be either alive (black) or dead (white). The keys to the system are the rules that govern which cells deserve to be alive and which do not after every generation, and the rules are in terms of each of the cells' eight neighbouring cells.

John Conway was not the first to come up with this premise, but his rules were the first to behave with consistent complexity, and they have even been proven to be capable of simulating other data-manipulation rule sets; Conway's Game of Life is Turing-Complete.

Now, here are the rules that govern the cells through each generation:

1. any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes alive,

2. any live cell with two or three live neighbours remains alive, and

3. any other cell remains — or becomes — dead.

With these rules, there are so many possibilities! I've included two below, in case you are interested in how this game actually pans out.