Thanks for sharing. I would like to add the Artistoo framework (not mine), which is an easy to extend implementation of the Cellular Potts Model in JS that you can also fiddle around with in the browser. It supports chemotaxis, movement of cells in reaction to nearby concentration of diffused chemicals. I have used this in a project with genetic algorithms to evolve cells that "hunt" for food.
I'm not sure whether this list is only for CA's, but I'm gunning for 'U-Skate World' (a specific set of coefficients on the Gray-Scott reaction diffusion) to one day hopefully have a chance at being shown to be turing-universal:
A second reading confirms that this is not really about universality or class-4, just anything with any similarity to GOL (in the discrete CA realm), a worthy list in it's own right!
If you like to read a bit of history on cellular automata I can highly recommend Neumann his biography [0]. Primarily about Neumann his life, so naturally quite broad, but a very interesting chapter about the early research on cellular automata.
Should be "Life-like", as the article spells it, as in, variants of Conway's Game of Life, not (literally) life-like.
And not even "Life-like" in the way you might think - the term apparently has a narrow technical meaning, only including CAs with the same setup as Life but with different rules for how many neighbours cause a cell to turn/stay off/on, and not any of the many other fascinating Life variants - like Larger Than Life, with a huge neighbourhood, or SmoothLife, with Life's discrete time, space and life/death rule boundary all turned (near-)continuous.
Thanks for pointing that out. I did slightly cheat HN rules by editing that, but only because I found it fascinating that many of the ones listed (like Maze) exhibit growth patterns that reminded me of biological life.
My favorite cellular automata has to be Wireworld. It has the interesting property that not only you can easily implement logic gates in it with very minimal rules, but it's also intuitive in that is shows electrons flowing in wires. It's powerful enough that you can build a computer in it and (sort of) understand it: https://www.quinapalus.com/wires11.html
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[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 51.7 ms ] threadhttps://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
https://chakazul.github.io/lenia.html
https://slackermanz.com/understanding-multiple-neighborhood-...
https://artistoo.net/examples.html
https://mrob.com/pub/comp/xmorphia/uskate-world.html
I've also found some things that I thought looked and behaved vaguely 'game-of-life-like' in other formulas in Ready:
https://youtu.be/W6sO8ZkgU9s
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56155133-the-man-from...
Should be "Life-like", as the article spells it, as in, variants of Conway's Game of Life, not (literally) life-like.
And not even "Life-like" in the way you might think - the term apparently has a narrow technical meaning, only including CAs with the same setup as Life but with different rules for how many neighbours cause a cell to turn/stay off/on, and not any of the many other fascinating Life variants - like Larger Than Life, with a huge neighbourhood, or SmoothLife, with Life's discrete time, space and life/death rule boundary all turned (near-)continuous.
Shameless plug: Years ago I wrote a widget where you can play around with Wireworld here: https://quiz.pixels.camp/archive/2017-2-no-wires-119ee898-c9...