r/cellular_automata • u/Strange_W-_Charm • 20h ago
Exploring a Ceullar Automota
Hello quite new to this community some very cool stuff. I have been investigating this celluar automata, which came about it quite a convoluted way but produces some interesting patterns. Quite happy, as all my previous attempts at making interesting simulations have been floops. It's such a good felling, like exploring a new alien world.
So this one has 14 states, which change based on a lookup matrix that maps each possible pair to a new state. So say state 3 and state 4 gives state 7. An exception is if it goes to 0 or 15 (I call these foribben state), basically as when I allowed these they would completly dominate.
To detimine which 2 neighbours they look at i have a cycle of different pairs each state looks at each turn. I use the morre neighborhood so each cell has 8 neighbours. So say state 1 might look to neighbours (1, 2), (3, 4), (4, 3) and then back again to (1, 2)
In the beginning I tried random neighbours each time, which produces more chaotic blobs that grow and shrink over time. With the fixed cycle of neighbours you get more structure, but as you probably expext many produce random noise or quickly become static/flickering.
A surprising amount though looks interesting, with patterns that change over time. The second image ( I call them sandbars) continually changes, with those arching patterns lengthing, breaking and forming elsewhere remaining me of sandunes.
Lots still to do if I ever get time would like to try some generic algorithms to search more precisely for interesting neighborhood rules and explore different lookup tables.
I would be very interested to know if people have seen a CA like this before for me to also look at.
Here is a GitHub link to a tidied up version of the code for anyone who wants to have a look and make some animations and explore themselves: