List of life-like cellular automata | Hacker News Reader

List of life-like cellular automata

conwaylife.com

109 pointsshmageggy10 comments

My favorite cellular automata has to be Wireworld. It has the interesting property that not only you can easily implement logic gates in it with very minimal rules, but it's also intuitive in that is shows electrons flowing in wires. It's powerful enough that you can build a computer in it and (sort of) understand it: https://www.quinapalus.com/wires11.html

Shameless plug: Years ago I wrote a widget where you can play around with Wireworld here: https://quiz.pixels.camp/archive/2017-2-no-wires-119ee898-c9...

If you are interested in cellular automata, here are a few cool extensions:

https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/

https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html

https://slackermanz.com/understanding-multiple-neighborhood-...

Thanks for sharing. I would like to add the Artistoo framework (not mine), which is an easy to extend implementation of the Cellular Potts Model in JS that you can also fiddle around with in the browser. It supports chemotaxis, movement of cells in reaction to nearby concentration of diffused chemicals. I have used this in a project with genetic algorithms to evolve cells that "hunt" for food.

https://artistoo.net/examples.html

> List of life-like cellular automata

Should be "Life-like", as the article spells it, as in, variants of Conway's Game of Life, not (literally) life-like.

And not even "Life-like" in the way you might think - the term apparently has a narrow technical meaning, only including CAs with the same setup as Life but with different rules for how many neighbours cause a cell to turn/stay off/on, and not any of the many other fascinating Life variants - like Larger Than Life, with a huge neighbourhood, or SmoothLife, with Life's discrete time, space and life/death rule boundary all turned (near-)continuous.

I figured "Game-of-Life-like" would describe it best.

Thanks for pointing that out. I did slightly cheat HN rules by editing that, but only because I found it fascinating that many of the ones listed (like Maze) exhibit growth patterns that reminded me of biological life.

If you like to read a bit of history on cellular automata I can highly recommend Neumann his biography [0]. Primarily about Neumann his life, so naturally quite broad, but a very interesting chapter about the early research on cellular automata.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56155133-the-man-from...

I'm not sure whether this list is only for CA's, but I'm gunning for 'U-Skate World' (a specific set of coefficients on the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion) to one day hopefully have a chance at being shown to be turing-universal:

https://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/uskate-world.html

I've also found some things that I thought looked and behaved vaguely 'game-of-life-like' in other formulas in Ready:

https://youtu.be/W6sO8ZkgU9s

A second reading confirms that this is not really about universality or class-4, just anything with any similarity to GOL (in the discrete CA realm), a worthy list in it's own right!

How come there’s no proper mechanical version of Conway's Game of Life?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com