Although it's C not C++, the best life implementation I've seen is still XLife: http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~callahan/lifepage.html Which uses a much better algorithym than just making an n by x array, making it run 100s of times faster for big patterns like "breeder". I've got a Windows version (sort of) working based on a half-finished X11 implementation I wrote some time back - email me if you're interested