Hashlife's pretty sweet although that particular answer you can get in time too short to measure by just typing some multiplications and divisions into a calculator. A glider contains 5 cells, a glider gun 36 and after the first glider at generation 15, the glider gun churns out a new glider every 30 generations, like clockwork.
True, although this reminds me of an old Von Neumann joke (it was probably a Newton joke once):
A colleague walks up to Von Neumann at a party. "Hey!" he challenges. "Two locomotives are speeding towards each other on a track. They begin ten miles apart and are both travelling at 30mph."
"A fly on the hood of one locomotive flies to the other locomotive at 60mph, then returns to the first, and keeps going back and forth between them until the two crash, killing the fly."
"How far has the fly travelled?"
Von Neumann considers, then gives the correct answer. "It's true," his colleague says, "you can instantly see the insight to any problem. You knew that you could merely sort out how long it takes and then work out the distance from the fly's speed."
Von Neumann frowns. "It seemed simpler to sum the series in hy head, and it's a more general solution."
Definitely a Von Neumann joke, the only unusual thing about it is that the terms themselves weren't infinite series.
Did you end up releasing your Coffeescript implementation? There's stuff like Golly but not a great deal in the way of readable higher-level language implementations out there.
