I just released a Game of Life Viewer (life_game_viewer on RubyGems) that you can use to view the behavior of your Game of Life implementations and experiment with different data sets. It comes with a sample implementation and data set that you can see by running the ‘life_view_sample’ executable installed with the gem. Github project page is at https://github.com/keithrbennett/life_game_viewer, blog article at http://www.bbs-software.com/blog/2012/09/05/conways-game-of-life-viewer/. The application must be run in JRuby, as it uses Java Swing for its GUI.