title: Optimizing Conway's 'Game of Life'
body: <p>To experiment, I've (long ago) implemented Conway's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway&#39;s_Game_of_Life" rel="noreferrer">Game of Life</a> (and I'm aware of <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1823/writing-a-conways-game-of-life-program">this</a> related question!).</p>
  
  <p>My implementation worked by keeping 2 arrays of booleans, representing the 'last state', and the 'state being updated' (the 2 arrays being swapped at each iteration). While this is reasonably fast, I've often wondered about how to optimize this.</p>
  
  <p>One idea, for example, would be to precompute at iteration N the zones that <em>could</em> be modified at iteration (N+1) (so that if a cell does not belong to such a zone, it won't even be considered for modification at iteration (N+1)). I'm aware that this is very vague, and I never took time to go into the details...</p>
  
  <p>Do you have any ideas (or experience!) of how to go about optimizing (for speed) Game of Life iterations?</p>