Below is a screenshot from a black and white implementation of Conway's Game of Life. This example makes use of the Bitmap object to speed up the pixel-based manipulation used in the code. To view this SVG implementation, click here.
A more impressive visual presentation can be achieved by allowing a live cell to fade to the background color with each new generation. To see an (extremely slow) implementation of this in SVG click here.
For those of you who have the .NET framework installed, I have written a C# implementation of the fade out effect. Not surprisingly it is much faster than the SVG implementation. Below is a screenshot and the executable is available here.
All examples define variables within the code to adjust the size of the world, the size of the individual cells, the reproduction rules, and as appropriate the number of decay levels.