Well, having some sort of a central clock to use for the Game of Life ticks is a prerequisite, right?* And then the ticks are an all-powerful global clock that

Well, having some sort of a central clock to use for the Game of Life ticks is a prerequisite, right?* And then the ticks are an all-powerful global clock that you get for free. A-la Leibniz's two clocks metaphor. * Unless you're trying to go for a distributed multi-verse implementation with separate boards having their own clocks and only limited message passing between them. The more I think of it, the cooler it seems. I'm now imagining setting up Erlang/OTP on these :)