I just got a terrible idea: combine this with another project, that built Tetris in Conway's Game of Life. That would enable executing an arbitrary program in Tetris, simulated in Game of Life.
This is an excellent link, well known in the "community" around this.
To add to it, here's a famous and really clear sub-2 minutes representation of the scales involved if it helps make things clearer, for those who've never seen the scales involved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-iIeKXE8 (and that's "just" the Game of Life in the Game of Life).
I think I would enjoy helping push the state of the art in this field, but it's far beyond my abilities for the moment - which may never change without years of research in my free time, which I cannot realistically do before I'm retired basically.
If it wasn't, I would love to work on a new library specifically built for the kind of things like your idea, with the API aimed at working with metapixels-based "hardware", but with the lowest-level constructs (maybe by far) being thinks like RAM or CPU caches as building blocks - while still being able to zoom to the lowest level of cells in the renderer. But it's basically R&D and HPC combined if one wants to offer an interesting alternative to the established libraries.
From what I know of upcoming hardware, such a library may have to wait a couple of years and basically target (as in, full buy-in, maybe at the programming language-level, certainly in tooling) the next Apple Silicon-like (or beyond) breakthough in commonly accessible hardware for a nice, "free" performance boost. Maybe GPUs are next?
That's really interesting, I did not know about that, thanks for the link ! It's highly specific but could make a lot of cool "wow-effect" products or software suddenly viable, especially if it percolates to your average consumer hardware some way or another.
https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/11880/build-a-w...