0E0P metacell/Snippet

The 0E0P metacell is a unit cell constructed by Adam P. Goucher between 2014 and 2018.<ref> Like Goucher's previous p1 megacell, it is capable of simulating any rule using the standard eight cell neighborhood, including non-totalistic rules.

A group of these metacells can be placed in an empty Life universe with no background grid of OFF metacells, and the entire universe then simulates the rule for which the 0E0P metacells are programmed, at a larger scale by a factor of 262144 = 2¹⁸. The acronym "0E0P" was originally short for "[State] Zero Encoded by Zero Population", so the OFF state is simply a metacell-sized region of empty space.

When one of these metacells turns off, it self-destructs completely, and when a metacell birth occurs, it must be constructed from the ground up by one of its neighbors. This allows 0E0P metacell patterns, when viewed from very far away (e.g., at a size where an entire metacell takes up a single pixel in the display), to be indistinguishable from normal patterns that use the same rule -- except that the metacell patterns will run 2^36 times more slowly.