John Conway

Gabe and I wrote an implementation of Conway’s game of Life back in the early 90s. We still have the code... it’s in old-school K&R C written back on 80286 and 80386 processors.

I pulled it up in a modern IDE and it seems to mostly compile. But the real trick is to get a lot of the display elements working... it’s one of those things that the core algorithm isn’t as much of a problem as everything around it.

So Mr. Conway passed away a few days ago from COVID-19.

I’m thinking of resurrecting the code in maybe a more modern language. C# perhaps. And give it a more modern front-end. The old one was written in an era when VGA graphics was the go-to.

It kind of gone-went.

But I think the core algorithm I came up with in 1990 is still the fastest around. And now we can even make this multithreaded, which wasn’t really an option back then.

Stuff like this gets my juices going too. Like what are the constraints of this? My guess is that it’ll be memory bandwidth limited at this point — especially if you don’t thrash the cache too much.