A Partly Successful Attempt To Create Life With Data Explorer by Chris Webb.
From the post:
I’ll apologise for the title right away: this post isn’t about a Frankenstein-like attempt at creating a living being in Excel, I’m afraid. Instead, it’s about my attempt to implement Jon Conway’s famous game ‘Life’ using Data Explorer, how it didn’t fully succeed and some of the interesting things I learned along the way…
When I’m learning a new technology I like to set myself mini-projects that are more fun than practically useful, and for some reason a few weeks ago I remembered ‘Life’ (which I’m sure almost anyone who has learned programming has had to write a version of at some stage), so I began to wonder if I could write a version of it in Data Explorer. This wasn’t because I thought Data Explorer was an appropriate tool to do this – there are certainly better ways to implement Life in Excel – but I thought doing this would help me in my attempts to learn Data Explorer’s formula language and might also result in an interesting blog post.
Here’s a suggestion on learning new software.
Have you ever thought about playing the game of life with topic maps?