@typhlosion Basically this is all because one of my dad's coworkers pre-installed Fractint on the family 386 before giving it to us. I remember the first night we had that thing sitting at the kitchen table during dinner, just watching it render stuff. ^.^

@indi yesss fractint is rad

@indi i haven't read ANKoS, i just liked CAs

i don't think i ever tried implementing Life, it would have probably taken too long to render each generation for it to feel satisfying

i can tell you i was playing with Golly on my computer around that time though

@typhlosion I haven't read ANKoS either but could NOT ESCAPE discussion of it when I was in college.

And I was there like "yes these exhibit a variety of different behaviors indeed, I have seen several of them" ;)

@indi sierpinski more like sier-pinch me i'm falling asleep over here

@typhlosion And yeah I spent a WHILE trying to figure out how to do Life in the TI-82; it was pretty hard because it requires keeping the next-state matrix in memory and I don't think I knew about multidimensional arrays then. XD

@typhlosion I mean, I was literally doing the 2D automata by _checking the color of the pixels on the previous line_ so.

@indi oh same, using the screen buffer as the memory seemed obvious to me

@typhlosion I did not know words like screen buffer, this was just the first thing that occurred to me. XD

(Oddly enough I think the higest-speed CA programs now use shaders to do it on the graphics card, don't they. ;))