Hashlife is a memoized algorithm designed to quickly compute the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conway’s Game of Life and other cellular automata. It was created by Bill Gosper in the early 1980s and utilizes hash tables to store subpatterns of the quadtree representation, allowing for significant improvements in resource requirements and speed. However, Hashlife performs poorly on highly chaotic patterns and can consume more memory and time compared to other algorithms. While it is more complex to implement, it has been implemented in software programs like Golly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife