If you remember Lifesa Trip from a few months ago, it was a mind-blowing, multicolored exposition of Conway's Game of Life on the DS. Problem is, working with it seemed more like an exercise in programming the game rather than the point-and-click simplicity you'd expect from the DS - and with that touchscreen, you dang well wanted that simplicity.

Enter Jeremysr, the PAlib dev behind DStrivia, who brings out DSLife. It's not as mind-blowing as Liefsa, since it's only black-and-white, but it is point-and-tap simple, using the touchscreen to draw images on the touchscreen before running the image-altering, chaos theory-demonstrating, zero-player program. It's only starters, but we can imagine further improvements to this homebrew to incorporate zoom-in on the larger "game boards", color, and so forth - Jeremysr envisions pre-loading the program with bitmap images as one future feature.

There are three versions in this package - one featuring a 32 x 24 cell board, the next 64 x 48, and the biggest 256 x 192. It's not really a game - though Jeremysa identifies it as a game in the PAlib forums because there was no other category he could place it in - but an app that demonstrates the scientific concepts of self-organization and emergence.

This is something that could be used IN a classroom, for example. If you are quite interested in this next-level math (or logic, or whatever) stuff, aside from downloading this program (and Lifesa Trip as well), you could head over to Wikipedia and search for "Conway's Game of Life" to learn more. Who says homebrew is a distraction from important education?