It looks like that life automation works with an array of structures where one element is an enumeration and the other a count of neighbors. I spent some time wondering where there was a algorithm that works with a bit representation of the active cells but operates at the byte level. As an aside the prime sieve in the Pi chart program uses a bit representation for the composite numbers. In that case the bit operations are costly enough there is enough work for reasonably good parallel scaling.I decided to eat ice-cream instead.
Purr recommends initializing an n x n periodic domain randomly and measuring the time Tn until an md5hash of the domain repeats. Then after repeated trials create a plot of Tn versus n to see whether there is a power-law relation between the size n of the domain and the time Tn. I think the kittens just want a warm place to nap.
In other news the scrubbing is 35 percent done. As the saying goes, what you have and what you want and what you'll get are three different things. As Scratchy used most of the computing budget to buy fish, the replacement disk came from the bargain bin labeled shingled magnetic recording.
Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Thu Oct 02, 2025 8:43 pm