I implemented Conway's Game of Life on the GPU exactly according to specification. I have a 2D simple visualization that looks like this:
... and a 3D visualization that looks like this:
The 3D visualization maps everything to a sweet wavy plane, and colors all dead cells red. When a cell becomes alive, it turns white and lifts from the surface. When it dies it slowly falls back down to the height of the surface and slowly fades back to red. Pretty cool, huh?