Jinyu, the Abbess Over All Clans And Concerns, was
inspecting the doings of her temple when she happened upon
one of the new mobile-application developers, toiling away
at his desk. She peered over the monk’s shoulder to see what
he was working on, but his screen showed only tiny black
squares pulsating on a white field. Jinyu rapped the monk’s
head lightly with her cane.
“Explain,” said the Abbess, pointing her cane at the screen.
“I have devised a new sparse data structure,” said the monk,
“and I wished to see if I could use it to implement an
efficient simulation of the game of ‘Life’.
The monk tapped a button on his tablet’s screen, clearing it
to a solid white. He then drew a jagged black line across it
with a stylus. When he tapped this same button again the
black line burst open, spreading across the display like
pixellated confetti.
Jinyu frowned. “So this is ‘Life’, is it?”
The monk nodded nervously.
Jinyu cleared the screen as she’d seen the monk do. Then she
took up the stylus and wrote neatly across the display:
ALL THE LABORS
OF ALL OUR DAYS
When she tapped the button again, the words immediately
putrefied and dissolved into a squirming puddle of black and
white maggots. From the maggots rose swarms of black-pixel
flies: scattering, multiplying, clashing, dying. Black
scavenger ants left the decimated corpses, gliding away in
unison to unknowable destinies at infinity. In a short time
all that was left was a great white desert, where a few
lonely specks of dust quivered in a faint, invisible wind.
Jinyu gave the tablet back to the monk. “A most accurate
simulation.”
* The hover text of the illustration is from Dave Matthews
Band’s “Ants Marching”, which fits nicely with the theme.
And if you really want your mind blown, check out this
wonderful implementation of Life in Life.
