A Life Algorithm that achieves remarkable speed by storing subpatterns in a hash table, and using them to skip forward, sometimes thousands of generations at a time. HashLife takes tremendous amounts of memory and can't show patterns at every step, but can quickly calculate the outcome of a pattern that takes millions of generations to complete.
References
Hensel, A. ``A Brief Illustrated Glossary of Terms in Conway's Game of Life.''
http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~callahan/glossary.html.