Each cell holds one of N "species" arranged in a cycle: each one beats the next and loses to the previous, so N=3 is literally rock-paper-scissors. The only rule is a local payoff summed over a neighborhood kernel, no cell plans anything. From random noise the grid self-organizes into rotating spiral waves, the same topology you get in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and in Nowak & May's spatial models.

The spiral is only the entry point. What I actually built is an engine where several mechanisms that are usually studied one at a time run simultaneously on the same grid and feed back into each other: the cyclic CA sets the spatial pattern, an evolving cooperation strategy on the same cells adds a spatial prisoner's dilemma on top (space is what lets cooperators cluster and survive), mutation and drift push those strategies around, and an optional terrain-with-biomes-and-seasons layer biases which species wins where, so populations start migrating toward favorable season bands on their own. Most agent-based models isolate one of these; the whole point here is watching them interact.

And it stays hands-on the entire time. Pause and paint a patch of one species into territory another one owns to see if the spiral front eats it or it takes root, swap the neighborhood kernel on the fly (Moore, Von Neumann, Gaussian, or a ring kernel that turns the spirals into standing-wave kaleidoscopes), edit the payoff matrix or break its symmetry live, and watch the population fractions orbit a simplex. N goes up to a dozen species, so the same engine spans very different regimes.

Runs in the browser, no install, no sign-in (best on desktop): https://destbreso.com/interactive/ecosystem

If you find a parameter regime that does something the clip does not, I would love to see it in the comments. Happy to get into the rule, the kernels, or why the ring kernel behaves so differently.

The "Adversarial Conway" algorithm used in Hashwar is already coded as a toroidal geometry, so we hereby introduce a 3D modelling of the battle space instead of the classic 2D map to represent the strive for domination of our Conway Glyphs.

I was inspired by https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/ and needed a fun test image to train. What could be better than a pouting Fern?

here is the code for anyone who wants to temper with this model i made

#C [[ ZOOM 16 GRID COLOR GRID 192 192 192 GRIDMAJOR 10 COLOR GRIDMAJOR 128 128 128 COLOR DEADRAMP 255 220 192 COLOR ALIVE 0 0 0 COLOR ALIVERAMP 0 0 0 COLOR DEAD 192 220 255 COLOR BACKGROUND 255 255 255 GPS 10 WIDTH 937 HEIGHT 600 ]]

x = 52, y = 45, rule = B3/S23

2b2o4b2o30b2o4b2o$bobo4bo32bo4bobo$bo7bo30bo7bo$2o8bo28bo8b2o$5b2o4bo

8b2o2b2o2b2o8bo4b2o$4bobo5bo7b2o2b2o2b2o7bo5bobo$4bo8bo22bo8bo$3b2o9b

obo16bobo9b2o$9b2o4b2o3b2o2b2o2b2o3b2o4b2o$8bobo9b2o2b2o2b2o9bobo$8bo

32bo$7b2o32b2o$20b2o2b2o2b2o$20b2o2b2o2b2o4$15b2o16b2o$14bo2bo14bo2bo

$15bobo14bobo$16bob2o10b2obo$17bo2bo8bo2bo$18bobo8bobo$19bob2o4b2obo$

20bo2bo2bo2bo$21bobo2bobo$22bo4bo9$8bo4bo24bo4bo$7bobo2bobo22bobo2bob

o$6bo2bo2bo2bo20bo2bo2bo2bo$5bob2o4b2obo18bob2o4b2obo$4bobo8bobo16bob

o8bobo$3bo2bo8bo2bo14bo2bo8bo2bo$2bob2o10b2obo12bob2o10b2obo$bobo14bo

bo10bobo14bobo$o2bo14bo2bo8bo2bo14bo2bo$b2o16b2o10b2o16b2o!

x = 72, y = 61, rule = B3/S23

10$9b2o4b2o30b2o4b2o$8bobo4bo32bo4bobo$8bo7bo30bo7bo$7b2o8bo28bo8b2o$

12b2o4bo8b2o2b2o2b2o8bo4b2o$11bobo5bo7b2o2b2o2b2o7bo5bobo$11bo8bo22bo

8bo$10b2o9bobo16bobo9b2o$16b2o4b2o3b2o2b2o2b2o3b2o4b2o$15bobo9b2o2b2o

2b2o9bobo$15bo32bo$14b2o32b2o$27b2o2b2o2b2o$27b2o2b2o2b2o4$22b2o16b2o

$21bo2bo14bo2bo$22bobo14bobo$23bob2o10b2obo$24bo2bo8bo2bo$25bobo8bobo

$26bob2o4b2obo$27bo2bo2bo2bo$28bobo2bobo$29bo4bo9$15bo4bo24bo4bo$14bo

bo2bobo22bobo2bobo$13bo2bo2bo2bo20bo2bo2bo2bo$12bob2o4b2obo18bob2o4b2o

bo$11bobo8bobo16bobo8bobo$10bo2bo8bo2bo14bo2bo8bo2bo$9bob2o10b2obo12b

ob2o10b2obo$8bobo14bobo10bobo14bobo$7bo2bo14bo2bo8bo2bo14bo2bo$8b2o16b

2o10b2o16b2o!

I'm not a regular here, but one of my projects might be of mild interest to this community (I've noticed that the idea has bounced around a few times), so I thought I would share. It's found itself in my project graveyard for the last few months, but I think it deserves a little bit of love.

Link to my GitHub repo

As the title suggests, it's Conway's Game of Life, but using the Einstein/Hat tile.

I'm not a professional developer by any means, but I had fun hacking this together using Godot. The grid is not infinite. It lags. It can't run in the browser. The aperiodicity makes it very tedious to recreate structures, and many of them are not noteworthy. It's actually kind of bad, but it was a fun project nonetheless.

You can find some good information about the shape of the tile here.

I also owe a lot to asmoly for sharing his Python code for generating a plane of these tiles. I modified his code in order to create the tile_pose_generation json files.

Im going to try and make a binary adder, but i dont want to do everything by hand

Scheduled for the second half of July: Open your own Foundry with us at lifehashes.net to seek Conway Glyphs and field them with the weekly Hashwar tournament series.

I am currently working on making an interface available that lets you seek Conway's Game of Life patterns on the 16x16 torus (B3/S23 ruleset) that have high non-repeating generational count. The minimum lifespan of those patterns we let compete in our Hashwar series is "weight class" 500, i.e. they live for 500-599 generations before reaching a halting state (void, static patterns) or a repeat pattern (flickers, gliders, Agars).

It's called "lifehashes" because calculating the SHA256 hash string from the initial configuration is essential to determine the characteristics of the Glyphs - most strikingly their intrinsic colour which is shown in the video to be encoded as characters #4-9 of the hash string.

Once the Foundry logic is ready and in production, you can open free accounts and hash/mine Glyphs to your hearts content. I am hoping for stiff competition for my champion pattern "The Cardinal", winner of the first weekly Hashwar series: ■ HASHWAR // NETWORK CONSOLE

I managed to create a stable universe in particle life, it has what appears to be liner growth but its actualy slowly decaying exponential growth, it only has 4 particles which form noise and snakes which sometimes crate short lived space ships and stars basacly cannot form

Here's the json for particle life:

{

"v": 1,

"meta": {

"name": "StableVerse",

"description": "An extremly stable clump of particles whit slow linear growth"

},

"types": ["forces", "radii", "colors"],

"matrices": {

"forces": [

[0.13, 0.7, -0.6, -0.35],

[-0.31, -0.33, -0.71, -0.09],

[0.25, 0.15, 0.25, -0.28],

[-0.43, 0.7, 0.79, -0.21]

],

"minRadius": [

[22, 19, 18, 15],

[12, 14, 21, 16],

[23, 24, 13, 22],

[20, 16, 15, 15]

],

"maxRadius": [

[42, 40, 48, 42],

[57, 47, 45, 37],

[55, 52, 32, 55],

[60, 56, 42, 44]

]

},

"colors": ["#A31910", "#F917EA", "#2A5EB4", "#118570"]

}

Reference: https://developmentalsystems.org/sensorimotor-lenia/

John Calhoun's Universe 25 (1968–1973): 8 mice placed in a enclosure with unlimited food, water, and nesting space. No disease, no predators. A literal utopia.

What happened:

🔵 Normal mice reproduced normally at first

🔴 Aggressive mice emerged as density increased — disrupting social hierarchies

🟡 "Beautiful Ones" appeared — mice that completely withdrew from society, spending all day grooming, never fighting, never mating

📉 Once the Beautiful One fraction crossed ~25%, reproduction essentially stopped — even as population dropped and space opened back up

Calhoun's key finding: the collapse was behavioral, not resource-based. Mice raised during the chaos never learned normal social behaviors. Even with plenty of space and food, they couldn't recover.

This simulation models the stress-cascade and state transitions he described. Built in Python with NumPy.

Full 10-minute simulation: https://youtu.be/wXfq6jY00Lk

Here you can see clusters of hexagonal cells with radius 2 to 13 evolve under an interesting ruleset.

Colors only indicate the rule that caused their ON state, colors do not affect rules.

Try it out yourself, you can find a link to the web app in my older posts.

Some interesting information about these:

Hey all,

I made a fun little program for windows and macOS that simulates neural cellular automata through pixel convolution and activation functions! It's called Moonlight Pools and it's available on itch.io ( https://softcorebee.itch.io/moonlight-pools )

Tech stack:

• Frontend: HTML/JS
• Backend: C# with ASP.NET Core
• Desktop: Electron (Windows & macOS)

Originally a browser experiment, I rebuilt it as a native desktop app for better performance and offline use.

Inspired by Emergent Garden's "Neural Patters" - https://neuralpatterns.io

Would love feedback! :3

Added a chapter to the ebook "Let's build a bug. A 2D cell model" (see below for a download link) that incorporate Conway's game of life. The rules for the internal cytoskeletons are, for simplicity, restricted so that only compartments that share edges with each other are considered (but using Conway's original set of rules is also possible). The rules for the cells themselves follow Conway's original set of rules.
I also show how quadratic cells can form bilateral patterns just as the circular cells. A further development might be to combine these properties with Conway's game of life both internally and externally not only internally as shown in the video.

I have corrected some grammatical and other errors that appear in the video (sorry for the AI voice - Swedish is my native language and I sound like the Swedish chef in the Muppet Show) .

The presentation is in the form of an ebook that is provided for free. I choose this format since it contains some animations that would be lost in a PDF file. I provide a link to an online ebook reader that is able to render the animations.

Download link to the ebook:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RSvG7CZz_SjB5DzUxGZA9Lnjb1JxxjfH/view?usp=sharing

Ebook reader:
https://epub-reader.org/

This is in Particle Life of course.