I read about this idea and actually built a variant in college for the Washington University ACM (our CS student club). We ran a demonstration at one of the eng

I read about this idea and actually built a variant in college for the Washington University ACM (our CS student club). We ran a demonstration at one of the engineering school events and ended up refilling the matchboxes multiple times that day - it was a hit! If I recall, there is a way to significantly reduce the number of matchboxes needed by taking advantage of mirrored board conditions. Somewhere I have a Perl script that generated HTML for all the matchbox covers and possible next states.