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According to the wikipedia link(http://www.conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel), each meta cell has 64691 actual cells. So to do a 100x100 grid once is 646,910,000 bits, or about 77 mb of storage at one bit per cell[1]. To do a 100x100 grid recursively just once would be 4.75 peta-bytes. Each cell would also have to be touched at least once per frame, so without even getting into drawing the damn thing we're talking about super computer levels of processing power.

[1] Unless you cheat by taking advantage of the fact that most of the cells are just repeats of each other. But cheating doesn't seem anywhere near as awesome.

edit--- That was actually a gross underestimation. The bounding box on the meta pixels is 4235364 cells, or about 65 times as many I said. So it's about 4.9 GB to do a 100x100 grid without any recursion. It's 643 zetabytes (2^70) to do it recursively once. It kind of makes me think that whoever did the video might have cheated even for that small animation.



"Cheating" by taking advantage of repetition is exactly how Bill Gosper's famous "HashLife" implementation handles really huge universes.

Here's my implementation in CoffeeScript, written in the "Williams Style:"

http://recursiveuniver.se


Yeah, I realized as I was typing it out that there must be "cheating" going on. After all, 99% of computer science is finding ways to "cheat".


Wherein cheating is a fun word for optimizing.


Either cheat, or change the rules (i.e., solve a related but easier problem).


so would a second level of recursion be possible with the hashlife algorithm?




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