Building a computer in Conway's game of life
So, for "pure" tasks which take input and produce output only at the very end, the Hashlife algorithm [0] allows you to run arbitrarily many generations of life in constant time at the expense of a huge internal cache (memory usage). That is, with Hashlife you can trade memory for computational efficiency. That means that for a sufficiently difficult task like mining bitcoin, this computer could be simulated faster than any conventional computer could run at the expense of using more memory.<p>My question: does anybody know what the ratio of trade-off between time and space is for Hashlife? I haven't been able to find anything from my searches.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife</a>