Optimizing Conway's 'Game of Life'

I am going to quote my answer from the other question, because the chapters I mention have some very interesting and fine-tuned solutions. Some of the implementation details are in c and/or assembly, yes, but for the most part the algorithms can work in any language:

Chapters 17 and 18 of Michael Abrash's Graphics Programmer's Black Book are one of the most interesting reads I have ever had. It is a lesson in thinking outside the box. The whole book is great really, but the final optimized solutions to the Game of Life are incredible bits of programming.

There are some super-fast implementations that (from memory) represent cells of 8 or more adjacent squares as bit patterns and use that as an index into a large array of precalculated values to determine in a single machine instruction if a cell is live or dead.

Check out here:

http://dotat.at/prog/life/life.html

Also XLife:

http://linux.maruhn.com/sec/xlife.html