Cellular automata, which includes Conway's Game of Life, is impressive because of the complexity that arises from simplicity. Starting from just a few simple rules and starting arrangements, structures can appear that you would never have expected.<p>Some people believe that our universe could be a type of cellular automata itself.<p>There are some interesting connections between our universe and the type of cellular automata like Conway's Game of Life. It is possible to predict events in the future by looking at the big picture. Various levels and hierarchies of structures are formed in Conway's Game of Life (e.g. gliders and glider guns) that seem to obey their own rules. However, these macro rules are nowhere close to the original micro rules of the simulation. While we can look at these macro rules to make certain predictions, the only way we can determine every cell's state in the future is by letting the simulation play out one generation at a time.
I would never have thought to take the licence of adding film grain, but it really makes the images tangible --- like bizarre long-ignored government surveillance photos.
There were similar renderings of Conway's Game of Life in Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, but by way of 1D-slices through time and grayscaling the second axis. These have the famous class 4 property that Wolfram raves about, leading to <i>the principle of computational equivalence</i> and such godless sentences.
Here are instructions for turning Blender files into RepRap instructions. I would pay to hang something like this on my wall.<p><a href="http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_print-sheets" rel="nofollow">http://objects.reprap.org/wiki/Using_Blender_for_making_prin...</a>
What i found very nice is graphs of the population size through generations of metuselah's, with my favorite being the R-pentomino <a href="http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=R-pentomino" rel="nofollow">http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/index.php?title=R-pentomino</a>