Conway's Game of Life

[fanf]

I wibbled a bit at this entry in the lisp community, which prompted me to go and dig out my old Life implementation. I'm now wondering what is a fast way of turning a list of co-ordinates into an image on modern hardware and software. Plot them into a bitmap and then use BITBLT primitives to transfer it to the screen? Use a display list mechanism to get the graphics hardware to plot them?

Compared to my lightweight life algorithm the graphics is a beast. OTOH modern computers are so fast that you can probably plot only a tiny fraction of the generations and it'll look OK.

Comments

[mobbsy.livejournal.com]

Talking of modern graphics and Conway's GoL, have you seen:
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/game_of_life.html

Oh, and more seriously, talk to fivemack about using modern graphics cards.

[fanf]

It's fairly obvious that graphics hardware can implement Life -- see http://www.geocities.com/simesgreen/gllife/ which refers to the OpenGL Programming Guide. It isn't a very good technique for computing large patterns, though.