Neutronium
Neutronium, in the context of multi-state cellular automata, refers to an additional cell state that is permanently live. A cell in the "neutronium" state is also said to be neutronic. Informally, the term may also be used to refer to anti-neutronium: a cell that is permanently dead.
The Neutronium rule
Neutronium was first considered by Mike Turniansky for a rule of the same name.[1] In this rule, cells can exist in three states, dead, live and neutronium, the last of which is always considered "live"; evolution happens as in Conway's Game of Life, except that a live cell surrounded by eight live neighbours (including neutronic neighbours) will itself turn into neutronium.
More precisely, patterns in this CA evolve according to the following rules:
- A dead cell:
- is born if it has precisely 5 dead neighbours (i.e. precisely 3 neighbours each of which is either live or neutronic).
- A live cell:
- turns into neutronium if it has precisely 0 dead neighbours;
- survives (remains live) if it otherwise has precisely 5 or 6 dead neighbours;
- dies otherwise.
- A neutronic cell:
- remains neutronic.
Many small patterns evolve the same in Neutronium as they do in Conway's Game of Life; however, the HWSS is unstable, due to a neutronium cell forming, and the R-pentomino explodes:
| “ | But the oddest surprise was the r-pentonimo [sic], which after 76,398 generations had a population of 86,158,122, including an estimated 20,000 gliders flying out in four huge sparse triangular formations (and about 20 orthogonal spaceships), fleeing a central seething ball of neutronioum [sic] growing at a rate of about 2/11c[.] | ” |
| — Mike Turniansky | ||
Generalisations and variants
Neutronium can be generalised in a straightforward manner to outer-totalistic rules other than Conway's Game of Life (B3/S23). Many neutronic automata created this way exhibit explosive behaviour, but not all do; B3/S2-Neutronium, for instance, is stable.
Other variants of the rule were created by 'c0b0p0' and Alexey Nigin.
See also
References
- ↑ Mike Turniansky (March 10, 2014). R-pentomino neutronium (discussion thread) at the ConwayLife.com forums
External links
- Neutronium at Wikipedia (the term)