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I agree with Wojowu's idea - I think a weighted sum would make the parameter (much) better. Langton's parameter is defined under the premise that the occurrence of 8 cells neighbourhood is as frequent as 1 cell neighbourhood. Obviously it is much often to see 1 cell neighbourhood in life-like CA tho...

I read the paper by Langton recently: http://informatics.indiana.edu/larryy/al4ai/papers/Langton.EdgeOfChaos.pdf In the paper, he suggests to use a parameter labelled as λ to measure the chaotic-ness of a cellular automaton rule. In a two states CA, λ is given by 1-n/2^N, where N is number of neighb...

Hello! I looked into oscar.py - it handles most patterns well by checking and comparing the hash vale of the patterns at various generations. However, since the algorithm checks the entire pattern, it fails when the pattern stabilise but keeps changing at the same time. The most obvious example is s...

Wojowu: I definitely made a bad guess : D Tropylium: Thank you for your comprehensive reply! One thing I don't really get - You mentioned that to determine evolutionary behaviour, one should consider a 4x4 or 5x5 area and count the number of possible states that could be evolved. Does one need to us...

The Conway's Game of life has the B3/S23 rule and I believe Conway picked this rule because this system is most chaotic/dynamic. Obviously the game of life would be very boring if B8/S8 was picked instead! I am wondering whether there exists a parameter that we can calculate (either mathematically o...

I got it now!
Thank you so much Wojowu

Wojowu: Thank you so much for your detailed explanation! I seem to have a much clearer understanding to the mechanism of primer : ) However, as you pointed out that the first primer is designed in such way that glider can destroy only every third LWSS - which implies the LWSSes moving to west don't ...

Hello everyone! Shortly after being introduced to Conway's Game of life I came across primer recently (http://conwaylife.com/wiki/Primer). I am fascinated by how the complexity of the system and the cleverness of Dean Hickerson. Is there any way to understand why the primer would work? What prime nu...