Editing Hashlife (section)

{{short description|Algorithm for speeding up cellular automaton simulations}}
{{More footnotes|date=September 2016}}
[[File:Turing Machine in Golly.png|thumb|379px|right|The 6,366,548,773,467,669,985,195,496,000 (6 [[Names of large numbers|octillionth]]) generation of a [[Turing machine]] in [[Conway's Game of Life|Life]] computed in less than 30 seconds on an [[Intel Core]] Duo 2GHz CPU using Hashlife in [[Golly (program)|Golly]]. Computed by detecting a repeating cycle in the pattern, and skipping ahead to any requested generation.]]
'''Hashlife''' is a [[Memoization|memoized]] [[algorithm]] for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in [[Conway's Game of Life]] and related [[cellular automaton|cellular automata]], much more quickly than would be possible using alternative algorithms that simulate each time step of each cell of the automaton. The algorithm was first described by [[Bill Gosper]] in the early 1980s while he was engaged in research at the [[Xerox Palo Alto Research Center]]. Hashlife was originally implemented on [[Symbolics]] [[Lisp machine]]s with the aid of the [[Flavors (programming language)|Flavors]] extension.