SmoothLifeL

Must see evolution of GOL: "SmoothLife is a family of rules created by Stephan Rafler. It was designed as a continuous version of Conway's Game of Life - using floating point values instead of integers." [VIDEO] [LINK]

24 parallel games combined in a way indecipherable to normal human eyes isn't terribly interesting to me. I find SmoothLife more interesting: [VIDEO]

If you're mesmerized by the "Game of Life" like I am your going to enjoy the Continuously Domain versions like smooth life. Check out the video[0], and an implementation in python[1] on HN. [0]: [VIDEO] [1]: [LINK]

Toffoli[0] & Margolus’[1] Cellular Automata Machines (1987) is the CA bible, I guess. Andrew Adamatsky edited the encyclopedic Cellular Automata (2018). Ed Fredkin's[2] stuff on reversible CA is fascinating. Gerard Vichniac[3] wrote some great papers in the 80s, e.g. Simulating Physics with Cellular Automata (1984). Kenichi Morita[4] papers. Rudy Rucker[5] has written a lot of stuff on 1 and 2D CA, and worked as a CA programmer. Etc. There are a lot of papers. The very common finite element method of solving differential equations and PDEs is basically the same thing as CA - see e.g. Anderson's Computational Fluid Dynamics . Attractors and approximations for lattice dynamical systems by Shengfan Zhou, 2002. 1954's Studies of Nonlinear Problems by Fermi, Ulam, Pasta, featuring a 1D CA. [LINK] Noether's theorem comes up frequently - that every symmetry of the system corresponds to a conservation law.[6] Smooth Life is Stephan Rafler's very cool version of CGOL with every discrete aspect turned into a continuous one.[7] [0] [LINK] [1] [LINK] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK] [6] [LINK] [7] best video of SmoothLife [VIDEO] [LINK] This slideshow by Rafler contains the best, most complete explanation of it I've found: [LINK] Shadertoy version [LINK]

Original post: [LINK] Technical details on the YouTube page: [VIDEO] (Two lots of source code available: Stephan's and mine) Other discussions about this: Reddit: [LINK] Metafilter: [LINK]

Good job. Any idea why using the parameters specified in the video description of [VIDEO] do not seem to replicate the output of the video? [LINK] I tried the same parameters in the version downloadable at [LINK] and it did not seem to produce similar output to the video either.

If you are familiar with Conway's game of life, there is also "smooth life" which uses turing style reaction-diffusion equations: [VIDEO]

(not directly related to the article) The cellular automata in the article is a discrete one. For those interested, there are also "continuous" automata [VIDEO] .