That reminds me of something that has nothing to do with C or obfuscation. There was a coding puzzle (read: hiring tool) posted here exactly a year ago. You were supposed to take a simple cellular automata, figure out what the code was doing, and add something interesting. I created a vertical shooter where the enemies (and your bullets) were subject to conway's game of life: http://jere.in/snow/

By the way, it turned out to be for shelby.tv

Very cool.

Could use a little something to prevent it from rapidly turning in bunch of oscillators and still life though.

Hmmm... I didn't give the controls: arrows move and space shoots. Shooting will mix it up.

Either way though, you're right. It's too easy to get into a safe spot and let everything reach steady state.

Very cool! But I just clicked the up arrow a bunch if times and got out of the screen entirely! Then I waited a couple of minutes & I had 6 digit scores.

That's really cool!

Thanks! I'm sure it would have been a hell of a lot harder to write in C instead of javascript (if not generally, then at least for me).

Oh wow! Awesome!

Neat. Although I find myself slightly disappointed it wasn't some inverted version of the rules where tiny little pockets of unlife rend their way through teaming colonies of automata.

Invert the colors, and there you have it ;-)

The philosophical ramifications! I just think this is a wonderfully creative use of Conway's algorithm.

it also compiles fine under cygwin, so you can run it under windows :)

interesting gameplay!