hello

after seeing a few youtube videos on 'Conway's game of life' id like to have a go at building one on a 8x8 led matrix to start with, then maybe something bigger later.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

im just looking for some advice on how to check each of the cell's neighbours are alive or dead without writing a shed load of IF/THEN statments for each cell (on a 8x8 led matrix there would be 64 cells with upto 8 neighbours for each cell)