Since we reported on early Java versions of Conway's Life by Orbital Technologies and Paul Callahan last January and February, and then Al Hensel's screaming implementation this past summer, more than twenty CA applets have appeared in the Gamelan Java Directory - search on 'Life' and 'Cellular' to find them. Exploring Emergence interactive tutorial gives a charming 10-part introduction to cellular automata in the spirit of Logo turtle graphics. This week's soup shows part of a CAM8 simulation of Brain after 100,000 updates, with the same coding as in the CAM book. In fact, almost everything ends up as a glider.
Glider guns are also very common, and they themselves are gliders.
And if you watch carefully, you might even find a glider-gun gun. Whereas Conway's Life evidently relaxes to a final mix of fixed and periodic local structures starting from generic disordered configurations, Brian's Brain establishes a dynamic statistical equilibrium of great complexity. Kellie Evans has since found similar chaotic steady states for higher range Larger than Life rules near the LtL phase boundary. Two more Java CA resources are worth mentioning. First, Bruce Christenson's Life has perhaps the nicest user interface to date.