Wireworld computer [Flash] (rezmason.net)

Doesn't seem to do anything? I thought the counter would increase in a flurry of pulses but after watching it for a good five minutes, nothing happened.

This is a good demo of how cellular automata don’t always have to look or behave like the Game of Life. Wireworld has four cell states—dead, wire, head, and tail—where dead cells stay dead; heads decay into tails, and tails into wires; wires become heads when excited by one or two heads; and wires stay wires otherwise. You can easily see how this gives rise to the “electrons on the subway” effect.

And in this system it’s fairly straightforward to actually build systems that compute things—albeit glacially slow. Contrast that with the Game of Life, where computation is more of an interesting emergent behaviour that’s about as easy as butterfly programming.

Now just need an svg/canvas version and a way to cheaply print it to silicon.

So can you make logic gates in this?

>[Flash]

As if.

For a better demo of this, download Golly and open Wireworld/primes.mc. Start it playing and hit + a few times to increase the speed. http://golly.sourceforge.net/

Golly has other cellular automata computers too, in the JvN folder.