This is my favorite part about the classic game. Many more people have experimented with the old one, though, most of the patterns in that may not have been clear early on either.

Regardless, there is something to be said for the simplicity of the classic rules.

The rules are a bit more complex than the original, but I'll try to summarise them.

* An empty cell has a chance to breed if there are two or more neighbours of breeding age (10-65).

* The chance of breeding slightly decreases for every neighbouring cell that's over 35 (the older they are over that age, the lower the chance of breeding).

* All cells have a small chance of dying on any turn.

* Cells that are "children" (under 6) or "elderly" (over 65) have an increased chance of dying, depending on how young or old they are.

* Young and old cells have an increased chance of dying from loneliness (less than 2 neighbours), which increases based on how lonely they are.

* "Adult" cells (6-65) have an increased chance of dying from overcrowding (4+ neighbours), which increases based on how crowded they are.

Unlike the original game, there's an element of randomness in the ability for a cell to breed or die, which means that it's not a repeatable simulation in the same way that regular GoL is.

I started the rules relatively close to societal norms (breeding from 16-45), and found that nothing could breed enough to sustain the population for long. I thrn tweaked the rules to their current set just to get populations to at least hold. You can get some more interesting patterns if you play with the death limits, but I haven't spent too much time looking for the perfect rules yet.

Pretty much all the limits are changable through the constants at the top of board.js.

Not quite as amenable to summarization in English as the classic rules: https://github.com/samlev/LIFEAsWeKnowIt/blob/master/src/js/...