[eru]

> I've written CGOL dozens of times, it's a common project that I do to "break in" a language I've learned, since it's not completely trivial but it's simple enough to not be frustrating, and I completely understand why math/computability-theory folks find it something to dedicate brain power to.

Writing a naive CGOL is fun and quick. But writing a _fast_ one can get arbitrarily complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife is one particular example of where you can go for a faster-than-naive CGOL.

[tombert]

Yeah, a million years ago I did that one as a convolutions so I could run it on the GPU when I was learning OpenCL. That was my first exposure to “optimizing” CGOL.