Larger than Life: Digital Creatures in a Family of Two-Dimensional Cellular Automata

We introduce the Larger than Life family of two-dimensional two-state cellular automata that generalize certain nearest neighbor outer totalistic cellular automaton rules to large neighborhoods. We describe linear and quadratic rescalings of John Conway's celebrated Game of Life to these large...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kellie M. Evans
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science 2001-01-01
Series:Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dmtcs.episciences.org/2288/pdf
Description
Summary:We introduce the Larger than Life family of two-dimensional two-state cellular automata that generalize certain nearest neighbor outer totalistic cellular automaton rules to large neighborhoods. We describe linear and quadratic rescalings of John Conway's celebrated Game of Life to these large neighborhood cellular automaton rules and present corresponding generalizations of Life's famous gliders and spaceships. We show that, as is becoming well known for nearest neighbor cellular automaton rules, these ``digital creatures'' are ubiquitous for certain parameter values.
ISSN:1365-8050