To experiment, I've (long ago) implemented Conway's Game of Life (and I'm aware of this related question!).
My implementation worked by keeping 2 arrays of booleans, representing the 'last state', and the 'state being updated' (the 2 arrays being swapped at each iteration). While this is reasonably fast, I've often wondered about how to optimize this.
One idea, for example, would be to precompute at iteration N the zones that could be modified at iteration (N+1) (so that if a cell does not belong to such a zone, it won't even be considered for modification at iteration (N+1)). I'm aware that this is very vague, and I never took time to go into the details...
Do you have any ideas (or experience!) of how to go about optimizing (for speed) Game of Life iterations?
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