Alt text rule

A similar pattern can be found on some snails.
Search for " Rule34 snail "

I like this, did you make this?

I guess you could say that. I wrote the software that generated the image. Just a small generative art project I'm working on.

Weird, rule 34 always looks something like this for me...

Hard to determine the direction the cellular simulation is going, but I'm assuming it's top to bottom.

That would make the rules (assuming light is alive)

• One neighbor alive above or above-right, you live

• All three neighbors above you are the same, you live

• Otherwise you die (two live neighbors above or one live neighbor above-left)

Generate a random row at the top, then determine the fate of cells on your at a time.

EDIT:

The only flaw I see in my logic so far is that the left most column would not be the same. Would only work if you had a hidden column on the left.

Yeah, this is one of Wolfram's "elementary cellular automata". This is "rule 30". It's actually a one-dimensional cellular automata. Only neighbors to the left and right are considered. The Y axis represent time / generations / iterations.

So there are 256 possible rules. Each represented by an 8-bit unsigned integer in ASCII format.

The "scenarios" are statically defined like this:

| 111 | 110 | 101 | 100 | 011 | 010 | 001 | 000 | 

And we can use a binary number like this to map scenario outcomes to create a rule set.

0 	1 	1 	0 	1 	1 	1 	0

Where each bit describes the outcome of the scenario.

So if all neighbors are alive (111) the next generation is dead (0). If the left neighbor is alive but right is not (110) the next generation is alive (1).

I'm improving my software and I think some of the changes I've made can make the simulation more clear and also more aesthetic.

In these images, up arrows are alive cells and down arrows are dead cells. I also included 2 images with the "links" feature enabled that shows the links between alive and dead cells across generations.

Bonus (this just looks cool):