Conway's Game of Life

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

Quite an interesting concept, and even though it's from 1970, it still takes a lot of CPU power to simulate it.

 

[|\/|-a-\/]

it still takes a lot of CPU power to simulate it.

why? i can't imagine...

 

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It takes a while to update one frame, eg. with a resolution of 512*512, you'll have to check 512*512*8=2097152 fields per frame. For example, in my implementation, that takes 40% CPU power on my 2GHz Athlon, frametime being around 10ms.

 

[zAlbee]

That's peanuts. 2 million ops checking a boolean array is totally doable. As you said, it can run in real-time, so it's really nothing

Ridiculous simulations are ones like protein folding which take days on a powerful CPU to simulate several milliseconds of actual folding. And then the really fun ones are the ones that you think will be cake to simulate, and then end up growing exponentially on you and never finish :doh:. I was tricked by one of those once, I can post it later if people are interested .


Back on topic, the original idea is quite cool, especially the indefinitely growing ones. Maybe it does mimic life and evolution in some way?