Patterns to Sound - 2D Cellular Automaton - Von Neuman cell conf

Brain storming while i was in the bus back from my small trip i though about how interesting could this complex patterns be if i can make some sort of sound related to their structure, with each iteration a phase transition occurs in the life time of a cell and i am not very familiar with musical theory, still i tried to represent the transition in a way that a certain key would be played according to the state (on/off) of it´s adjacent cells. This created some interesting creepy melodies according to friend but i kind of like them. My initial research is aimed to find rules that fall into the complex patterns group so experimenting with sound that complexity is a must this was the outcome so far.

There is still a lot of things that can be arranged to make this patterns create more interesting sound loops but this is like a whole new project, for the moment I'm gonna leave this just as it is.

Meta programing and ship desing

Now that the rules with the correct behavior are identified  its just a matter of looks, here are some examples of my future  ships.

Seed:
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 *0*
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Other possible patterns.

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Exploring Automaton Trails - Search of Innovative Game Mechanics

Following my  curiosity  i have come this far riding the wave of the unknown, the  patterns i generate are  now two dimensional  rather than just the limited but not yet less important one dimensional cellular automaton, i worked with those ones on my bachelor thesis, the two dimensional CA are more dynamical with the addition of a 2D java graphics engine i implemented.

Some times i go around and ask people what can they see or what do they think about this fractals,  answers are very diverse, some people just see some shapes or  graphics that at the end means nothing to them, others just see nice graphics and relate them to something they know, but i see patterns everywhere i see an evolving network connecting all this self contained abstraction of a physical system,  everything even the slightest change has an effect sooner on later in every part of the system.

I have this feeling that there is more here than just simple graphics and having explored this phenomena by my self without too much previous reading in the past made it  kind of exciting but at this point  in order to find useful application i need all the information i can get, that includes  reading articles, publications or  anything that is related to the CA dynamics.

Then  comes the question  can we compare reality to a 3D lattice composed atoms?  further more if we make an abstraction of reality and consider atoms as automatons then what can we say about life? according to "Langton  life should be considered primarily an informatics phenomenon rather than a conventional chemical reaction or physical state".  One could say that interaction such as friction is a simple information transfer that creates changes across the network in a physical system the same way that sending a messege to remote terminal generates an answer.

Making a survey of Chris Langton paper on  "Comptation Edge of chaos" i came upon some more clarifications. Langton suggest that there is a fundamental connection between phase transitions and computation in physical systems, this phase transitions are transformations of a thermodynamic systems from one state to another.  In many systems in nature and elsewhere,  discrete   structures emerge even when the underlying system is seemingly continuous. One origin of such discreteness is the phenomenon of phase transitions.  Which means that under certain rules an abstraction of a discrete physical system, with random initial states will converge to discrete patterns, this convergence  from chaos to a complex order is the main object of my investigation.


I decided to design a program that could let me explore this ideas and having completed some iterations in the software, the fascination is just exploding  but the less i am been able to understand, the nature of the rules  i have designed  work outside of the  Conway  game of life rule, and lead to some interesting evolutionary patterns that really catch the eye.  When doing the neighbor cell count on the validation process, i created a sort of pulse  that traces the evolution of the system all the way back to it's source as you can see below.

One idea i had was to find a rule that allowed me to control how much can the system grow, i have been working on in something called the fractal rule in which  i have managed to control the automaton from eternally expanding to a controlled range of growth, i some how implemented age as attribute on a cell so this automaton will live for a certain time(iteration) then the cell stops taking its elementary state and the system has to continue evolving the cells that where left in higher order states.

i draw an "E"  applied a fractal rule and let it grow.

After a while only a portion of the system remained active, 5533 iterations latter a stable form became immortal(stable) inside the system that could no longer have elementary states on their cells.



I have hard coded some interesting rules that i want to explore as much as i can making a trail of the dead cells let's us visualize  the trail left by a cellular automaton over time,  based on the Conway game of life, this patterns, generated as a result of cells that once where alive seems to be a description or a water mark of the evolution and behavior of a certain pattern in Conway initial states.  It kind of  reminds me very much to the concept of  using automatons at nano scale to create complex structures. 

 http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/picgloss/pic132.life

So far its all about exploring and experimenting and its just becoming more  addictive and interesting, i'm hoping i can come up with more features and applications that could help me present this topic, so far this patterns are nice and interesting but more work i needed  on the rule design so i can expand the capabilities of this software and how it can help in my search for CA IV automaton rules.

Langton RL system

One thing that i had to try after reading Chris Langton publication was the Langton RL systems, here he does not consider a lattice where information flows in parallel but each cell gets sequentially updated. I took me  while to expand the software but it is now working no periodic boundary is available yet but it is in a todo list.

Langton's ant is a two-dimensional Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complicated emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells.^[1] The universality of Langton's ant was proven in 2000.^[2] The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Langton_s_ant.html

                                           Langton RL stable system 50000 iterations later