@jknilinux, awesome idea, i don't know how you could program it but if you did it would be awesome. You can defeat the whole speed of light thing just by having the code execute through the entire bot at once, not one cell at a time. I like the idea of bots changing their shape. You could have glider gun bots just by forming a glider shape and filling it with cells. Optimally you could have each cell in the bot have a state. Eg, wether that cell was counted as dead or alive by the simulator. Then each cell change the state of any or all of the eight squares around it each cycle. Bots would also be able to grow new cells in the same way, and any cells unconnected from the main body would die. Also any cells not connected to a group of cells of a certain size (say 100) would die, so reproduction would just be growing a body segment large enough and detaching it. They would be a pain to program manually so maybe some kind of visual programming interface where you could define what each cell should do each cycle? That would be a pain to program in and of itself but it might be worth it.