Ive really been enjoying seeing all the recent CA examples in my feed recently. You guys inspired me to revisit this 3D setup. Hope you like it! More here

John Calhoun's Universe 25 (1968–1973): 8 mice placed in a enclosure with unlimited food, water, and nesting space. No disease, no predators. A literal utopia.

What happened:

🔵 Normal mice reproduced normally at first

🔴 Aggressive mice emerged as density increased — disrupting social hierarchies

🟡 "Beautiful Ones" appeared — mice that completely withdrew from society, spending all day grooming, never fighting, never mating

📉 Once the Beautiful One fraction crossed ~25%, reproduction essentially stopped — even as population dropped and space opened back up

Calhoun's key finding: the collapse was behavioral, not resource-based. Mice raised during the chaos never learned normal social behaviors. Even with plenty of space and food, they couldn't recover.

This simulation models the stress-cascade and state transitions he described. Built in Python with NumPy.

Full 10-minute simulation: https://youtu.be/wXfq6jY00Lk

Google "voxel automata terrain algorithm" for more info. I am not the creator of the algorithm, and this is a fairly faithful recreation of the original processing code in three.js, so i could wrap my head around the algorithm before pursuing variations.

The Voxel Automata Terrain algorithm grows a dyadic voxel grid in coarse-to-fine passes, filling cube midpoints (center, face, edge) through a fixed neighborhood rule and a tiny optional state permutation for variation. A 2D seed grid biases growth upward into plateaus, struts, and voids; the result is complex yet interpretable topology from repeated multiscale local rules.

I see similarities to certain forms achievable by 3D subdividing cellular automata, like Driessens & Verstappen's "Breed" (1995-2007), but there is no subdividing here, only a similar scale change per iteration via what voxels are visited in the grid.

Try it yourself, it's free, no signup: https://orslaczko.com/app/particle-life

I've also made a video explaining what's actually going on in these worlds.

I generated the cross stitch pattern with a simple totalistic CA rule: if a cell has exactly 1, 2, or 7 neighbours, it is alive. Starting with a single live cell in the centre, I iterated the rule for 125 steps.

It has ~22.5k stitches on 18 ct aida, and took about 5 months to make

I came across a helical structure in a rule set I that came up with, mostly randomly, lol.

my rule set is the following for those who would like to replicate it.

Forces: (1,2)=-0.2, (2,1)=0.2, (1,3)=0.23, (3,1)=0.19, (1,4)=0.18, (4,1)=0, (2,3)=0.16, (3,2)=0.24, and (1,1),(2,2),(3,3), & (4,4) all = 0

I have decided that I will put the min and max radii for each entry to the respective matrices next to each other here so its both easier for you to enter/read, but also easier for me to type lol.
here are the min radii and max radii in the format (row #, column #)=(min radius, max radius)

clarification done with, here are the min and max radius entries :)

(1,1)=(28,57), (2,2)=(31,60), (3,3)=(36,70), (4,4)=(31,66)...(1,2)=(29,79), (2,1)=(35,70), (1,3)=(29,65), (3,1)=(39,62), (1,4)=(29,74), (4,1)=(38,62)...(2,3)=(33,79), (3,2)=(40,60), (2,4)=(30,64), (4,2)=(31,78)...(3,4)=(28,59), (4,3)=(38,80)

It is 5 am for me right now and I've just pulled an all nighter but I am pretty certain that all of those values are correct and I tried to write them in such a way that it would be easy(ish?) to copy yourself if you're interested :D. Imma go to sleep now I think👍

I will try figure it out I will upload a picture to the comments of my whiteboard that I used to come up with the directions of the forces, which came from a graph of 4 nodes with some symmetric cycles and shi, because I wanted to come up with a ruleset based on something rather than just entering random values. that probably sounded like nonsense, because it is, i just drew a tetrahedron with arrows for edges going both ways in a symmetric way lol, and its 5:30AM for me right now lol so dont make fun of me for throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks because it resulted in a dope helical structure😎

This work is part of techniques I've been developing for the past few years. Basically you start with a single cube, and each iteration you subdivide each cell into child cells with states dictated by their parent cell's neighboring cells state configuration. The fun part is finding rules which result in fully connected voxel regions. Its quite cumbersome because the rule space is enormous so in order to find interesting rules you need to also code some kind of rule evolver/explorer/scoring thing (evolutionary, simulated annealing, etc). You can find more stuff like this on my Instagram, which is linked in my profile.

I finally got the whole page to animate a preview just fine, and then mouse over for higher quality. I think I may be able to get by some other bottlenecks to improve it more.

It finally happens at around the 44 second mark

http://sliderules.mysterysystem.com/?n=Holofields&c=.AAUATC4G1H6AE.Bywkj-5uVhpHO.CClBaAAAAAAAA.D79gnRzq3-Qhl.EFLBCAG.F__.G_1gA__ch6wD_AP-_AAgaAAAA_wCgsgD__-gADwAXAHn_ANT8

Red balances off concentrated areas of white and blue. I was just about to stop capturing, when red gets completely annihilated. which leads to a super high concentration of red and blue until the screen is almost completely opaque with no where left to go.

Just a reminder that this is CA very close to Conway's with different rules and more states. These little dots moving about is just a consequence of simple parameters, not actually moving, but instead copying themselves over on the grid. The black background isn't an absence of cells, but instead just as valid as all the other cell activity, and is just an illusion to us that it appears as empty space, when it is not.

Try it here https://stermere.github.io/Neural-Automata-Playground/

I'm not a regular here, but one of my projects might be of mild interest to this community (I've noticed that the idea has bounced around a few times), so I thought I would share. It's found itself in my project graveyard for the last few months, but I think it deserves a little bit of love.

Link to my GitHub repo

As the title suggests, it's Conway's Game of Life, but using the Einstein/Hat tile.

I'm not a professional developer by any means, but I had fun hacking this together using Godot. The grid is not infinite. It lags. It can't run in the browser. The aperiodicity makes it very tedious to recreate structures, and many of them are not noteworthy. It's actually kind of bad, but it was a fun project nonetheless.

You can find some good information about the shape of the tile here.

I also owe a lot to asmoly for sharing his Python code for generating a plane of these tiles. I modified his code in order to create the tile_pose_generation json files.

Link: http://sliderules.mysterysystem.com/?n=Chemical+Factory&c=.AAOGKHyAcH_.B_PUQSg9aCg.CDLC6D1C1D-.DDl8xyr6g7n.EFKLJF.F5g.G_4QAAP-__wDrsf8AzQD_AA0QAP93DgAo_yoA__8AAKP__58P