Disclaimer: Generated by AI, Gemini 3.8 through Antigravity

Cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life are almost universally taught and implemented imperatively: allocate a two-dimensional grid array, iterate over every row and column with nested for loops, count the 8 Moore neighbors, and write the next state to a backbuffer.

Following my recent work building ops5 in Go (and the deep dive in Building OPS5 in Go: Implementing the Rete Algorithm from Scratch), I wanted to put the engine through its paces with something visually tangible, reactive, and non-trivial: