Contents
How to optimize the game of life stack?
There are some super-fast implementations that (from memory) represent cells of 8 or more adjacent squares as bit patterns and use that as an index into a large array of precalculated values to determine in a single machine instruction if a cell is live or dead. You should look into Hashlife, the ultimate optimization.
Is the game of life a programming book?
It is a lesson in thinking outside the box. The whole book is great really, but the final optimized solutions to the Game of Life are incredible bits of programming.
How to speed up the game of life algorithm?
As mentioned in Arbash’s Black Book, one of the most simple and straight forward ways to get a huge speedup is to keep a change list. Instead of iterating through the entire cell grid each time, keep a copy of all the cells that you change. This will narrow down the work you have to do on each iteration.
Which is the best language for the game of life?
We implement the game in two languages, Python and Haskell. Our main purpose for implementing the game in these two languages, is to compare their performances in terms of speed, as well as the codes’ elegance. In Figure 6, we define the Game class. It is made up from a set of rules, an initial state and a maximum size (width and height).
What’s the best way to optimize a program?
A good rule in computer optimization is to “make the common case fast.” First, find out what things your program does all the time, then make those parts of the code better. If you make a function dramatically faster, but it only runs 1% of the time, you haven’t actually made your application faster — just that one function.
How are bit arrays used in game of life?
I used the Game of Life as a good example of conserving space using bit arrays for data with binary values. Each cell is either on or off, so I used 1D array of flags, and translated that to a 2D grid of cells. The bit array used in this program can be found here. Into the never.