What happens when half a cellular automaton runs Conway's Game of Life and the other half runs a rolling version of Rule 30 pushing chaos across the border? youtube.com/watch?v=IK7nBOLYzd, via news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2

I wish I could see a larger scale of time and space to get an idea of how far the effects penetrate. If the boundary emitted gliders at a constant rate they'd collide far away in a form of ballistic annihilation but the boundary junk and glider-collision junk makes it more complicated.

@11011110 The fact that "30" completely describes the ruleset of the bottom CA (in the context of a 1d binary CA with a contiguous 3-cell neighborhood) blows my mind.

@freakazoid Yes. The number of possible rules, $$S^{S^{(2n+1)^d}}$$, looks like it grows enormously quickly, but when $$S=2$$ (two states), $$n=1$$ (neighbors are only one step away), and $$d=1$$ (Rule 30 is a one-dimensional rule), its actual value (256) isn't so bad.

It does seem odd to me to encode what is inherently a binary value in decimal, though.

@11011110 I think that's just to make them easier to communicate, and to make it clearer that it's a "dense" numbering scheme that enumerates all possible rulesets.

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