This is an implementation of Conway's Game Of Life as a jq filter.

Enjoy.

Why not?

jq is a filter language for JSON data. It takes JSON input, and produces JSON output. I wrote a filter program that takes in the previous board state, and outputs the next board state.

Then I put it through some post-processing to produce the pretty picture above (runpretty.sh). Without that post-processing, it looks more like this (run.sh):