This was a small software toy for playing with two-dimensional cellular automata. As the program runs, new lines are calculated based on simple rules, wherein the state of each cell is determined by the state of that cell and its two neighbors in the previous line.
Since three cells are taken into account, there are eight (two cubed) possible states, any one of which can lead to either an on state or an off state. While the program is running, the function keys F1-F8 can be used to toggle the result for each combination, resulting in different visual patterns being created.
If you’d like to try it for yourself, the program can be downloaded here. Sorry, windows only.
EDIT, 2013-07-14: Note that if you do run the program, it will run almost too fast to see the patterns. Sorry- I wrote this a decade ago, and it just renders frames as fast as it can. I tuned it to look good on my 2003 laptop, but things are… a bit faster now
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