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A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

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Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#5
post #2

How come the GoL runtimes are only ~300 times longer than the VarLife runtimes? Is it because the metapixels can be more efficiently simulated than running the game of life rules? Or because of sparsity of cells or some-such thing? This is seriously cool BTW.

You can simulate the metapixels singificantly faster using Hashlife by caching the results for previously seen patterns. There's a pretty interesting dr dobbs article describing the core idea [1].

[1]: https://www.drdobbs.com/windows/an-algorithm-for-compressing...

Re: A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life

#8
post #4

Has anyone done Conways game of life in Conways game of life?

In this case they're running lisp running in VarLife running in the game of life.

This Varlife is simulated using the OTCA metapixel, which was designed to run the game of life inside the game of life, though it is more general and can therefore also be used to simulate VarLife.

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