Game of Life 64

This is the game of life implemented using only 64 bits of storage for the bitwise challenge.

Usage

# start from a random initial state
python gol.py

# start from a given state
python gol.py e0a0e00

Interesting States

• 70402 simple glider
• 7700 lines cycle
• 3030 a box (ok maybe not that interesting)
• e0a0e00 complex cycle

Implementation

The state is treated as an 8x8 grid of 1-bit cells (alive or dead).

The number of neighbors is counted using a pre-computed bitmask for each position and python's built-in int.bit_count(). The rest is pretty straightforward. Not a lot of interesting tricks we can do here.