The Life Engine
thelifeengine.net
thelifeengine.net
It's been running for me for a few minutes at top speed and it hasn't gone over 8 celled organisms, but it had an explosion at some point where it went from just a few species to over 200. I wonder if the algorithm could be memoized like in hashlife.
This one seems quite a bit more sophisticated but the dynamics are very similar.
If you ever get the chance I recommend writing your own life simulator program, it’s great fun! It also demonstrates how easy it is to produce complex behavior from relatively simple instructions
What you may be asking about is visualization. In this case, just use simple drawning functions in a graphics library that will draw a pixel to a screen canvas at the cells coordinates. Update on each tick.
Seriously amazing for not only fun but easy access to preconfigured solvers if you want to quickly test out ideas, plus it’s packed with presets too. I’ve racked up many hours using it since finding out about it a few months ago, highly recommend.
Their website lists all the features right on the homepage: https://www.softology.pro/voc.htm
It even has all the latest in ML, I use it to launch Stable Diffusion and CLIP all the time.