Experiment · 2026 · Live
Rule Safari
Hunts through all 131,072 Life-like cellular automata for the interesting ones, and catalogs the creatures living in them.
Rule Safari
Hunts through all 131,072 Life-like cellular automata for the interesting ones, and catalogs the creatures living in them.
The question
Conway’s Game of Life is one rule among 262,144 of the same shape. Written B3/S23, it says a dead cell is born with exactly 3 live neighbors, and a live cell survives with 2 or 3. Change the digits and you get another universe. Most of them are dull: they freeze, die out, or boil into static. A few are alive the way Life is.
Can a program find those few without being told which ones are famous?
The hunt
Rule Safari screens every rule that keeps empty space empty, studies the best 1,500 up close, and writes a field guide: one HTML page where each chosen rule runs live next to the spaceships and oscillators found in it.
It never sees rule names. On the default seed it still ranks Conway’s Life second out of 131,072, just behind its close relative EightLife. Seven of its top ten are rules that already have names on LifeWiki. Along the way it caught 34 kinds of spaceship across 27 rules. The full hunt takes about 90 seconds on 16 cores.
The trick that made it work
The first scoring loved the wrong rules: big still blobs with edges that flicker forever. The fix was to compare each soup with itself 12 generations earlier. Twelve is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12, so most oscillators line up exactly and cancel out. What’s left is change that goes somewhere.
Honest limits
The census only sees small, fast creatures, at most 16×16 cells and period 16. Day & Night is known to have spaceships, but none were caught. The score encodes one idea of “interesting”. Other weightings would find other gems.
How it was made
This is one of my nightly builds: an AI agent invents, builds and tests a new project every night. Rule Safari came out of the 14 October 2026 run.