What is a cellular automaton?

A cellular automaton (CA) is an evolving, “living” system that forms complex and repetetive behavior from a few simple rules. Basically the entire world of a CA evolves every timestep, with each cell either surviving, dying, or coming to life depending on the state of the previous generation. A CA can really live in N-dimensional space, but the most commonly studied and emulated CAs live in 2D space–a grid.

Each cell in this grid has 8 neighbors surrounding them. The evolution of this cell depends only on how many of these neighbors are alive or dead. A cell is said to exist if it is alive, and is considered nonesxistant otherwise (even though the point on the grid still exists). In this version of a CA–modled after Conway’s Game of Life, the most famous CA–a cell survies if there are 2 or 3 neighbors and dies otherwise; a dead cell comes to life if there are exactly 3 neighbors and stays dead otherwise. In the nomenclature of CA this ruleset is S23B3, or Survives with 2 or 3 neighbors, is Born with exactly 3 neighbors, and dies otherwise.

In this repo:

See the Pen Conway's Game of Life by Conner Addison (@csaddison) on CodePen.

There are two main files, elemCA.py and conwayCA.js. The first is meant to be run locally and prints a rule 110 elementary cellular automata to the terminal for 300 generations. The second is a p5.js script that runs in the index.html file. Additionally there is a test script in the deprecated folder for trying dynamic printing to the terminal.