Close variants of Life

[mmcirvin]

Probably the most-studied minor variant of Conway Life is High Life, B36/S23, which I mentioned earlier (3 or 6 neighbors cause birth, 2 or 3 cause survival). It appears very much like Life, but has a simple replicator that copies itself in an XOR-ish way along a diagonal line. Conway once said he thought maybe it was the CA he should have

Comments

[mmcirvin]

I shouldn't say I'm so sure about the B37/S238 breeder expanding forever; it's very messy and creates expanding glider-shooting chaos at its root. The influence of that seems to grow slowly enough that the breeder can outrun it, but I haven't proven that.

[mmcirvin]

I vote that still life 12.121 be called the "bullhive".

[mmcirvin]

OK, it's already called the "super beehive" by somebody.

[mmcirvin]

...Life Lexicon calls it the "honeycomb".

[ikkyu2]

Does fooling around with Life and variants have any utility, or is it just amusing for its own sake?

[mmcirvin]

Utility? Not really. Cellular automata were originally invented so John von Neumann could make a point about the feasibility of self-replicating machines, and models and machines resembling CAs have had technical applications. And people occasionally insist that they're related in some profound way to the structure of the universe, though, as I said in earlier posts, I find these claims dubious.

But there's nothing particularly special about Life apart from its having lots of interesting behavior relative to the simplicity of its rules. It's just a curiosity abetted by the availability of sufficiently powerful computers (and algorithms).