If you are willing to count games where an external program overwrites the game state(rather than relying on in-game rules to generate the result) using a bitmapped display is pretty close to using the Game of Life as a UI by taking a finite chunk of the gameworld and scribbling values into those cells. Not a very elegant use of it, though.
Youād have to beat the refresh rate of the game itself in order to do it that way, though. Youād probably end up with something prone to a lot of āstaticā as the game rules tried to take control.
The more interesting way would be to strategically inject/destroy cells so that the gameās rules would perform as much of the screen updating for you as possibleā¦
I think that youāve just proposed the most awesome and least practical video compression codec of all time:
The file format would include the entire first frame of the video, as the seed state for that game; and then the remainder of the file would specify either a set of inject/delete operations or a request for a certain number of iterations of the game; alternating as needed until something acceptably close to each frame in sequence has been displayed.
Now, the business of writing an encoder that can take an initial state and compute the mixture of inject/delete and iterate requests(without resorting to the trivial solution of simply forcing the next frame entirely with inject/delete operations and zero iterations of the game rules, which would be simple but uninteresting) required to hit a series of target states is left as an exercise.
Of all people to say this ;(
And Pokemon Coās lawyers eat NOAās for breakfast.
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