Are the changes worth making? No guessing! Here are the measurements,
>>>
u_rows = 100
u_cols = 100
generations = 100
live_pct = 42
total_time : 0.93
copying_time : 0.50 = 53.22%
aging_time : 0.44 = 46.78%
>>> That's around 8 times faster or an 800% speed increase. Well worth doing. Which you will on the current assignment :-)
(Hmm...I see that while we sped up the aging block we also slowed down the copying block. This is because we truly do copy now, whereas before we were renaming and then just allocating new blank memory (see the footnote on the previous page) without the requirement to loop over it assigning values, which we do have to do in the new scheme.)