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r/cellular_automata

▲ 326 r/cellular_automata+2 crossposts

In 1968, scientists gave mice unlimited food, no predators, and infinite space. The colony still collapsed. Here's an agent-based simulation of John Calhoun's Universe 25 experiment — 1,646 mice at peak, 14 at the end.

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

u/SimulatedEcology — 1 day ago
▲ 29 r/cellular_automata

Hex clusters evolving

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:

Cluster Radius final cycle duration
2 3
3 3
4 6
5 3
6 28
7 3
8 60
9 6
10 42
11 42
12 12
13 30
u/SciStone_ — 1 day ago
▲ 117 r/cellular_automata+4 crossposts

Visions of a Hydra

Inspired by Numberphile’s “Red & Black Knights” problem: players take turns placing pieces along a square spiral, and each new piece must respect the threat relations already created on the board.

I expanded the original knight-only system into a more general field of chess and fairy-chess leapers: knight, fers, vazir, camel, zebra, antelope, eland, satrap, aspbad, spehbed, marzban (following Jonas Karlsson’s generalized Stendhal variants). Each color becomes a player, each player has its own movement logic, and the image grows as a record of where conflict allows matter to exist.

For this series I used two modes: "symmetric" and "random rivalry".
Random rivalry creates a seeded matrix of antagonisms between colors: some players threaten each other, some ignore each other, and self-antagonism can also appear. Symmetric makes the rule stricter: a piece is rejected both if it would be threatened by an existing rival and if placing it would threaten an existing rival.

What moves me most is how much pattern emerges from such simple rules. A spiral, a few leaper moves, and a rivalry table start producing territories, borders, blooms, scars, almost like little frozen wars. I’m honestly ecstatic watching these structures appear from logic that still feels small enough to hold in my head.

Sources / inspiration:

Made with p5.js and GPT-5.5

IG: u/outertales ♥^(!)

u/OuterSilent — 2 days ago
▲ 2 r/cellular_automata+2 crossposts

Lil Conway Game of Life Simulator but 3D

Hey guys, I had this idea for an idle game type project and this is my current working prototype using gemini and antigravity.

Tools:

Core Engine: C (compiled to WebAssembly)

Frontend Framework: React + TypeScript + Vite.

3D Rendering: Three.js via react-three/fiber.

Styling: Vanilla CSS

The intention behind vibecoding was to test out web-capabilities for myself even if the produced code isn't the best. Its relatively computation heavy.

I started off planning the general architecture. React could not calculate the required computations, so all the heavy lifting was offloaded to a web assembly engine in c. Then I planned the bridging module to access pointers from js. At this stage, I sent the plan to the agent and had some back and forth till the logic ran correctly.

Then I planned using fiber to map the visuals and then did some more ui tweaking.

Things I noticed:

Maybe its just Gemini but its not great at finding efficient solutions to problems lol. Either that or my planning/querying needs improving.

For some reason the AI duplicated state for simulation logic between js and c. This is why I needed the bridging module, to scrap the js part of the engine.

Another thing was memory. The AI initially wanted to use these massive structs for every single cell which was eating up memory. I had to tell it to pack the alive state and neighbor counts into a bit array.

The processing loop was also unoptimized at first. The agent basically wrote a brute force loop that checked every cell 60 times a second even if the board was completely empty. I had to step in and divide the grid into chunks so it tracks active zones and completely skips processing dead space.

For the visuals, it originally tried rendering physical borders around every single box geometry. I directed it to use a single instanced mesh instead and bake the cell grid outlines directly into the cell sprite using custom shaders. I also had it make dead cells completely transparent so you can see through.

State management in react was another headache. The AI threw the player points into a global context, which meant the entire 3D canvas and UI was re-rendering every time a cell died and awarded a point. Had to scrap that and build a custom subscription store just for the points text so it bypassed the react tree.

Finally, getting the game of life rules to wrap seamlessly around the 3D edges of the cube was tricky. We ended up using a synchronized halo buffer around each face that mirrors the adjacent faces using pure integer math to avoid float issues.

Would love to hear what you guys think and any feature suggestions. PS you can click "NEON LIFE 3D" 5 times to enter debug mode and get a better idea of the game, warning it's bright.

Here's the github:
https://github.com/Ifterbi/Neon-Life-3D

neon-life-3d.web.app
u/pewpewpew228922 — 1 day ago
▲ 23 r/cellular_automata

Moonlight Pools

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

u/Entire-Interview7448 — 2 days ago
▲ 4.5k r/cellular_automata+3 crossposts

Processed using near-infrared (CB2, MT2) filtered images of Saturn's north polar hexagon taken by Cassini on November 27, 2012.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/Kevin M. Gill

u/Busy_Yesterday9455 — 7 days ago
▲ 36 r/cellular_automata+1 crossposts

CA generative audio. Species independent composition.

OK I picked an A minor scale to map the pixels to frequency, the rest lies in the topology. Listen on this FREESOUND link.

u/protofield — 6 days ago
▲ 60 r/cellular_automata+4 crossposts

CA generative function to audio visual.

First experiments using FFT techniques to generate audio based on generative geometric structure. This example is a rendering as a polyphonic heavy metal nocturne, played pizzicato and tuned to an equal temperament Lochrian scale using a root frequency of 73.4Hz (D2). Each pixel is an oscillator and the surrounding pixels define its harmonic content. Main image is a section of the generative function and brighter centre section shows part of the the sonification data. Multi channel capability is obtained by a slight offset of the data for each channel. For example left data is plus two pixels offset on the y and right data is minus two pixels. Centre channel has no y offset and the final audio is a mix, right = 20% centre plus 80% right. This facilitates easy construction of 64 even 128 channel sound spaces. A 5.1 192 kHz audio version of this example can be located on this link at FreeSound.

u/protofield — 9 days ago
▲ 0 r/cellular_automata

So Wolfram hired Cook and others to do lab work, as a glorified LLMs. Cook confirmed one rule is turing complete. Wolfram hoped it will sell the book, funding further research. Cook leaked trade secret, inflicting financial and reputational damage (less people buy book). Would you hire Cook?

reddit.com
u/Afraid-Yoghurt6731 — 12 days ago
▲ 30 r/cellular_automata+3 crossposts

Upcoming graphics update preview (left side: old, right side: new)

Graphics update comes to Synthesist 1.1 and then to Bioclast alpha 0.3! Here's the breakdown:

Release History

  1. Scale Space Causmonaut (2025- Unreal, itch.io, 1gb ~ 500mb)
    • This version is how I initially proved out the approach to viewing and navigating Scale Space. All of the primary features, visuals, etc. were hardened in this phase and if you buy Scale Space on itch, you can play the latest build (windows only). I have another release of Causmonaut partially done and I will come back to it when I can to finish it.
  2. Scale Space Bioclast Alpha 0.1/0.2 (2026- webGPU, itch.io ~ 1mb)
    • The initial port from Unreal. File size was reduced from 500mb to 1mb and particle count was increased to 1m comfortably on a few-years-old GPU (4070ti).
  3. Scale Space Synthesist 1.0 (2026- webGPU, open source ~ 964kb)
    • This version was built based on Bioclast 0.2 and I was able to greatly improve the UX and fix a ton of bugs. And of course, it's now open source on github as well as zenodo if you want to cite it in formal complexity science research.

Upcoming Releases

  1. Scale Space Synthesist 1.1 (Very soon- 2026- webGPU, open source ~ 965kb)
    • Tons of bug fixes and UX improvements, new features + graphics update.
  2. Scale Space Bioclast alpha 0.3 (Soon- 2026- webGPU, itch.io)
    • This version will contain all of the fixes I made to Synthesist and begin to move into a diverging identity. Going forward, Bioclast will use Synthesist as its CORE engine. This means that when I make updates to the core of Scale Space, I will do it on Synthesist and that will bubble up to Bioclast.
  3. Scale Space Bioclast Beta 0.1+ (Mid- 2026- webGPU, itch.io)
    • Sound/music, new themes, multiplayer, holographic atlas, and many other things. This is the version of Bioclast that will begin to behave more like a rich gaming experience like Causmonaut does.
  4. Scale Space Causmonaut Beta 1.9.3 (2026- Unreal, itch.io)
    • UX improvements, bug fixes, a few new features. A release for the Causmonaut fans in the audience. The unreal build has a genuinely different look and feel than the webGPU builds. This release is almost done, but I am prioritizing the cross-platform builds first (Bioclast/Synthesist).

Confusing Enough?

Good! Clear as mud. Here's a simple way to think about it:

  1. Causmonut: The OG. The ancestor of everything else.
  2. Synthesist: Open Source, cross-platform. The core engine going forward.
  3. Bioclast: The upcoming itch releases- a layer of rich functionality/multiplayer/graphics/sound on top of Synthesist. (edit: cymatics modes too)

The important thing to know is that the core functionality for all three versions is the same and the main differences are the graphics pipeline + platform-specific features.

Thanks for supporting the project! I wouldn't be able to do this without the enthusiasm of r/ScaleSpace, so just want to take a moment to appreciate each of you!

Best,

setz

Scale Space on itch: https://setzstone.itch.io/scale-space

Scale Space on github: https://github.com/setzstone/ScaleSpaceSynth

u/solidwhetstone — 13 days ago