Life, part 34

ericlippert.com

3 pointsazhenley3 comments

If any of you, like me, were looking for part 1: https://ericlippert.com/2020/04/13/life-part-1/ (that's the introduction; I found it quite helpful to understand what we're looking at here.)

Forgive me for being rude, but is this exercise simply exploration? It appears to me the author is looking for something (within their discovery) - but I am at a loss to what that could be.

The question -- if sincerely asked -- is not rude.

My goal for this blog, which I have written for 17 years, is to write about algorithms, programming techniques, language design, and other stuff I find interesting. If you find it interesting too, consider subscribing.

The goal of this particular series, which should top out at 36 episodes, is to make a survey of different techniques for computing the Conway's Life automaton. The specific point I want to make in doing so is: the standard advice for optimization is to make a relatively naive implementation, profile, and then attack the slowest part by micro-optimizing it. Though this can be done in a principled manner, there are some algorithms where we can take advantage of facts about the "business domain" to craft much more performant algorithms than we could by simply finding small efficiencies in the inner loop. Life is definitely such an algorithm; there are opportunities for compression of both time and space that can lead to surprising performance optimizations.

My advice would be to start the series from the first episode rather than trying to start in the middle.

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