[im3w1l]

You could do the same without transforming to game of life. Iterate over all possible states the memory can be in, and emulate a cpu with that memory for N steps.

But if you have 640 kilobytes memory (ought to be enough for anyone), that means your cache will have 2^640000 entries.

When transforming to game of life every bit of memory becomes many cells in the grid, so the requirements for that would be even worse.