“College dorms generally don’t allow you to have pets in the room. Even if you did keep a pet, you would have to dedicate time and money to feed it and maintain it’s environment. However, sometimes it’s still nice to have another lifeform in the room besides your roommate… Give digital life a try! Today I’m going to show how I made Conway’s Game of Life on an Arduino Nano, displayed on the Nokia 5110 LCD Screen. The hardware setup should also allow you to explore other cellular automata algorithms and games of life. I like to look at Conway’s game of life as a bunch of bacteria or microbes. By having a randomly generated starting map and following a simple set of rules, Conway’s game of life can fascinate you with the different life forms, structures, and sequences it displays. It’s like a digital petri-dish or fishtank that you can check on as a distraction.”