z2

You know, I'd considered Conway's Life before. With the criteria that it (a) shouldn't take more than one board cell per grid cell and (b) shouldn't do anything too awfully slow.

But I didn't bother.

And then, for reasons that have not been explained, I wind up wandering back here for a few moments, perhaps out of morbid curiosity. And of course I see someone doing the 2x2-to-a-grid-square method, and someone else apparently rotating the grid and requiring serialized object movements proportional to the total number of squares to do a single generation and it just _irks_ me so.

I seem nearly incapable of running away from particular classes of terrible ideas, so here we go. http://begriffli.ch/files/zzt/dpwlife-20100217.zzt

Push the yellow button to begin. The default pattern is an R pentomino; there is no in-world editing. The board is 40x22; it can probably be extended to 56x22 or so by just adding more workers. Some tweaking could probably net 23 rows instead.

Not responsible for bugs (though still curious if you find any, of course). Not polished. Usual other disclaimers apply.

Clever idea using colors to store living-dead information.

Also, hey, I just realized you're the guy who made that ZZT Mandelbrot plotter!

I was going to suggest someone do langston's ant, but I realised that wouldn't be much of a challenge. This implementation is nice, the colors actually let you see what's going on. I really like seeing different solutions to the same problem.

In the future though, limit the world names to 8 chars or zzt has a fit.