devlog 1 - humble beginnings

Do you like cellular automatas? do you have no idea what they are? well you’ve arrived at just the right place, here in automatown you can see all kinds of different cellular automatas do their many cool things.

For real though, if you dont know, a CA (cellular automata) is basically a grid of squares each having a value (usually either 1 or 0) that look at their neighbouring cells and then update themselves according to preset rules after controlled “ticks” or “generations” (a popular example caould be conway’s game of life). CAs are very good at generating crazy patterns, being chaotic and unpredictable and even turing-complete! (meaning you can make computers inside them).

A lot of CAs have easily findable programs that simulate them or pictures showing their interactions, but it can be a lot nicer to have a single place for all of them. I’ll also try to add useful information and preset grids where I can.

My project is basically just a program that can simulate as many different CAs as I can fit in it, built in unity (because that’s what I know how to use).
Right now I have:

• code that simulates the 256 elementary cellulr automata
• an ok way to visualize it and move through it, more quality of life features to be expected, hopefuly more optimization too, as that’s not something I’m not knowledgable in AT ALL so it runs quite poorly.
• an extensive amount of time not logged because it was spent researching the topic. CAs really interest me but I never formally learned about them. I also downloaded hackatime after making some stuff, so there is like at least an hour not logged because of that.

provided below is an image I got from a single black cell on the very right of the grid and rule 169.