if you've been in compsci cirles, you've probably heard of Conway's game of life, a cellular automaton built on simple rules that however displays highly complex emergent behavior to the point of being turing complete
a blank(dead) cell becomes filled(alive) if it has 3 alive neighbours and an alive cells survives if it has 2 or 3 alive neighbours
due to the simplicity it is often used in exercises and code golfing
however, it seems bizzare to attempt this as an action script in an image processing software, especially one whose scripting feature does not support explicit code
and yet, all of this is completely possible
utilizing #000000 for dead and #FFFFFF for alive, convolving the image with the following matrix results in every cell now having the data for the amount of its neighbours and whether or not it was alive in the previous generation in (roughly) uniform value steps
from there, we can select specific color ranges (in our case three replace color actions with values gray:82.35, 41.18 and 35.29) and color them #FFFFFF
and then replace everything non-#FFFFFF with #000000 with a levels function
and afterwards, after rerunning the script several times, familiar GOL shapes start appearing
