Rulegolfing

Rulegolfing is an activity of constructing new rules or looking for variants of rules via successive incremental modifications to the rule definition, for example by adding or removing birth/survival conditions in the rulestring written using Hensel notation, or by changing lines in a rule table. Rulegolfing may involve multiple modifications of a rule, for example attempting to understand which changes make the rule explosive/chaotic, and trying to reach a rule with some desired properties. In general, any given "syntactic" change in the rule definition (such as adding a certain birth condition, or removing a certain survival condition, or adding/removing a line in a rule table) may have very different effects when the "syntactic" change is applied to different rules.

An example of a rule that was found via rulegolfing is the Langton's Ant simulator (B3-cjkq4knqy5cnr7/S02-cn3-ak4eiq5kq6e7e).

Existence of a well-recognised widespread notation to define rules from a given rulespace can be a powerful tool for rulegolfing, when the notation splits the rule definition into intuitively understandable parts that can be modified independently from each other.

See also

• Tutorials/Finding rules
• Hybrid rule