Yup, the Quest for Tetris project caused an entertaining stir for a while. The people that worked on that were the best kind of "hacker" -- fearless experimenters who didn't let their lack of Life-specific knowledge get in the way of cobbling together an amazing structure that fit the bill for simulating Tetris.
The project has at least one unnecessary extra layer of abstraction in it, but somehow nobody has quite gotten around to rebuilding it 100x smaller. A "HashLife-friendly" version could run thousands of times more quickly in Golly.
Since then, several people have invented their own independent computer architectures in Conway's Life, so that kind of experimentation is still going on. See, e.g.,
The project has at least one unnecessary extra layer of abstraction in it, but somehow nobody has quite gotten around to rebuilding it 100x smaller. A "HashLife-friendly" version could run thousands of times more quickly in Golly.
Since then, several people have invented their own independent computer architectures in Conway's Life, so that kind of experimentation is still going on. See, e.g.,