Design principles for configuring 18-bit rulesets to yield lifelike cellular automata

Establish principles or mappings that relate the 18-bit ruleset (two nine-bit binary strings specifying update outcomes for live and dead cells across neighbor counts in the Moore neighborhood) to the emergence of rich lifelike behavior, thereby enabling the reliable construction of non–Conway’s Game of Life rulesets and rulesets in other cellular automaton systems that exhibit similarly lifelike dynamics.

Background

Lifelike cellular automata in this paper are defined by two nine-bit binary strings that determine the next-state of a cell given its current state and number of live neighbors, yielding an 18-bit parameterization of the ruleset space.

While CGOL is known to exhibit lifelike dynamics, the paper emphasizes that beyond trial-and-error there is no established methodology for choosing the 18-bit parameters to reliably produce comparable lifelike behavior, both within this lifelike class and in other cellular automaton frameworks.