I’ve been playing the Game of Life (Conway’s 2d cellular automata) ever since it appeared in Scientific American. First by hand, using checkers on a board, later on the first PC’s in BASIC and finally in hugely accelerated mega projects.
Having used Rudy Ruckers’s CA-lab software, I became a fan of the NLUKY rule sets. Conway’s Life rule set is one of them. But there are so many more to explore. Here you find them in 3D. Using the Z-axis for Time and using a simple voxel render engine written in Processing to visualize them.
In Processing they are animated, growing from bottom to top, and I can watch for hours as all kinds of random rule sets are tried. Most of them explode or disappear, or turn into seething chaos. But between nothing and chaos, there are the interesting ones. If I like them, I save them for later study. Here you can see some of the more interesting ones I have come across. I now keep a library of interesting NLUKY rules.
