Also, somewhere along the line you changed what the program was actually
doing - originally you produced a 20x21 grid, but that got reduced to a
20x20. 

I used this to make sure I didn't change the program during golfing:

require 'stringio'
out = ""
$stdout = StringIO.new(out)
srand(1);

$><<"\e[2J";s,o,f,c,u=20,"#","
";b,q=(z=0..s).map{z.map{(rand<0.3)?o:f}},
(m=[-1,0,1])-[0];until
c==b;c=b.map{|z|z.dup};$><<"\e[H"<<b.map{|x|x*f}*"
";s.times{|i|s.times{|e|n=((m*2+q).sort.zip(m+q+m).map{|x|(c[i+x[0]]||[
])[e+x[1]]}-[f,u]).size;b[i][e]=(n==2?b[i][e]:n==3?o:f)}};sleep 0.2;end

$stdout = STDOUT

#uncomment this to reset the content of the file.
#File.open("monkeys","w") {|f| f << out }

raise "Different" unless File.read("monkeys") === out 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cardologist / gmail.com [mailto:cardologist / gmail.com] On 
> Behalf Of Joey
> Sent: Thursday, 4 May 2006 5:16 AM
> To: ruby-talk ML
> Subject: Re: Golfing a signature.
> 
> I now have my signature! It is 305 charcters long, wit help 
> from Florian and
> Dave!
> you can check it out at 
> http://code.eachmapinject.com/game_of_life_golf.rb
> or just below my name!
> 
> Joey
> http://eachmapinject.com
> 
> s,o,f,c,u=20,"#"," 
> ";b=(z=0..s).map{z.map{(rand<0.3)?o:f}};$><<"\e[2J";until
> 
> c==b;$><<"\e[H"<<b.map{|x|x*" 
> "}*"\n";c=b.map{|z|z.dup};s.times{|i|s.times{|
> e|n=(q,z=-1..1,[];q.map{|x|q.map{|y|z<<[x,y]}};(z-=[[0,0]]).ma
> p{|x|c[i+x[0]][
> e+x[1]]rescue 
> u}-[f,u]).size;b[i][e]=(n==2?b[i][e]:n==3?o:f)}};sleep 0.2;end
>