Now, I've played with the mlife object from Maxlib a little bit but not enough to understand it.  I do however, understand normal one dimensional cellular automata.  It was 1 am and I was bored so I decided to try and construct one as an abstraction.  The only external you'll need is Zexy as I take advantage of [makesymbol].  The advantage of this, as you'll see, is that unlike the mlife object, you can resize this one to meet your needs.  By resize, I mean set it up to use any number of cells.
 
http://defaced.net/buck/pd/cell.pd
 
-Jordan