In this homework assignment you will interface with a cellular automation simulator. The rules are very simple. The board is a grid. Each grid square can hold at most one cell. For a cell to survive from generation to the next, it needs two or three neighbors. Too many neighbors cause the cell to starve. Too few neighbors causes an incurable case of ennui. All is not lost. If a grid square has exactly three neighbors, a new cell is born, which is kind of strange when you think about it. In this simulation, a grid square that includes a cell is marked as 1, and 0 otherwise. For example 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 1 would represent a 16 square grid, with 7 cells, where the underlined cell has no neighbors. There are many variations on this game, which is Conway's Game of Life and is a B3/S23 game. That is, cells survive with two or three neighbors and are born with exactly 3 neighbors. This game is can be extended into the real domain or more dimensions. However, we will stick with the original B3/S23. You are being given a very naive evolution implementation called evolve. It works, but it is slow. See how fast you can make it run (we've discussed optimization techniques). Outcomes:
Understand and apply the loop and other optimizations we discussed, including:
Remove loop inefficiencies and reduce procedure calls
Reduce unnecessary memory references and loop unrolling