This whole thread has been rather odd.  The sort of processing that goes on in Conway's Game of Life is pretty common.  I've seen it implemented a good many different ways, including with GCD from apple where each cell could potentially be its own thread (good scalability test for apple it seems... neat code, doesn't even use Cocoa).

I've got some very simple code for Conway's Game of Life, but it is not my own.  It's from Dr. Graham Hutton's excellent Haskell introductory book.  Doesn't even use external libraries from the Prelude.  It's short and easy to read, and renders by plotting characters a terminal using escape sequences (so I guess it's VT100 at least required to run it).

I'm left somewhat confused by people believing they know enough about functional programming to make claims like these, or that the processing used in Conway's Game of Life might not be important.  As someone who's worked in HPC for 1/3 his life and his entire career, I find this to be a pretty closed minded approach to computer science.  

The worst form of ignorance is when you think you've got the answer to everything already...  It's sad to see that going on here.

Dave