Cellular Automata
Everything here, unless otherwise noted, is under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, links to and motivation for which you can read here. You may also notice use of the Studio LAB logo, which I've written an explanation about here.
Before you move on and keep reading, note that all these images were generated entirely automatically by a computer, I did not manually edit any of these after they were initially produced by a program.
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2 State CA
For cellular automata with two possible states for each cell, there are only 2^(2^3) = 2^8 = 256 possibilities. That's pretty easy for a computer to auto-generate all of them. I selected the ones that stood out to me here.
Read the code here.
3 State CA
I then expanded to 3 State CA to see if it yielded more complex, but still attractive patterns. However, going up even one state number increases the possiblities dramatically! There are now 3^(3^3) = 3^27 = 7,625,597,484,987 possible rulesets, generating all of which would take far too long. So instead I randomly generated rulesets and images for them, then I picked the ones that stood out to me.
Read the code here.
4 State CA
Just like the 3 State CAs, my motivation was to see whether I could arrive at images with ever-increasing complexities that, although randomly generated, had some structured quality that we could recognize. Once again I did a random search through only some of the possibilities, since there are now an absolutely mindboggling 4^(4^3) = 4^64 = 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible rulesets.
Read the code here.
