I went through these challenges a while back; they were super fun! I remember at the end there was something about “notify me if there are more challenges” but I don’t believe I ever heard anything.
I’m a sucker for puzzles, and the write-ups for the challenges were the right level of silliness.
Super interesting read! Thanks for sharing.
I’d be interested to see how impactful a sparse representation would be. It’s an optimization I know to have been useful from trying it on AoC and similar cellular automata problems, but I have no clue how it would mesh with the other optimizations made here. I would guess its effectiveness would also rely heavily on the particular ruleset you were simulating, as well as your starting state.
Why restrict to 54-bit signed integers? Is there some common language I’m not thinking of that has this as its limit?
Edit: Found it myself, it’s the range where you can store an integer in a double precision float without error. I suppose that makes sense for maximum compatibility, but feels gross if we’re already identifying value types. I don’t come from a web-dev/js background, though, so maybe it makes more sense there.