The direct implementation of the Life system could be implemented as a bit per cell, along with a few dozen gates and timing circuitry. However, have you ever

The direct implementation of the Life system could be implemented as a bit per cell, along with a few dozen gates and timing circuitry. However, have you ever seen the systems used to emulate logic circuits? They take a lot of cells. Eg, https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2020/intro-to-circuits-game-of-life.html https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2020/intro-to-circuits-... . You end up using scores of cells to emulate one simple logic circuit - and the implementation contains many hardware versions of that logic circuits. Note also that in practice the high-performance, long-time Life implementations use hashlife. This gets its speedup because of redundancies in large life boards - a redundancy that doesn't really exist for, say, matrix multiplies. And hashlife is harder to implement in hardware.