Lots of interesting software around Conway's Game of Life. Here is Hashlife [1], where the states of living organisms are hashed; sometimes enabling prediction of all future states.<p>It helps trading-off computation with space, sort of like Halide [2] does.<p>I've been playing a bit of Factorio with the social distancing recently. The bottleneck of mega-bases is often compute power. I wish the developers could implement something akin to Hashlife. The bases are made of the same repeated patterns, all possible states of which could be memoized. This could be the next step in automating to a higher scale.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife</a><p>[2] <a href="https://halide-lang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://halide-lang.org/</a>
The way I understand why this is possible is due to the fact that Game of Life is Turing Complete, and can therefore construct a Universal Turing Machine capable of simulating itself.