Digital Life 02: Remove Almost Everything

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:08:00 +0100

In the previous chapter we started with something complicated.

A continuous field.

A smooth neighborhood.

A growth process.

Localized structures that moved through space.

Patterns that looked disturbingly creature-like.

That was useful because it gave us a mystery.

Now we are going to destroy almost all of it.

Not gradually.

Aggressively.

We want to know:

How little machinery can remain before interesting organization disappears?

Start with the kind of system we saw in Lenia.

Cellular Automata From First Principles 23: Search All 256 Elementary Rules

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 18:56:00 +0100

Cellular Automata From First Principles 23: Search All 256 Elementary Rules

Elementary cellular automata give us a rare luxury.

The complete rule space is tiny.

There are only:

256 rules

So we do not need sampling, intuition or famous examples.

We can evaluate every rule.

Build an experiment runner

Assume we already have:

run_rule(rule_number, width, generations, initial_state)
fingerprint(history)

Then exhaustive search is simple:

def scan_rules(initial_state, width=201, generations=200):
    records = []

    for rule in range(256):
        history = run_rule(
            rule,
            width=width,
            generations=generations,
            initial_state=initial_state,
        )

        records.append({
            "rule": rule,
            **fingerprint(history),
        })

    return records

The hard part is no longer execution.

Elementary Cellular Automata on Programmer.ie: Modern AI programming

Digital Life 02: Remove Almost Everything

Cellular Automata From First Principles 23: Search All 256 Elementary Rules

Cellular Automata From First Principles 23: Search All 256 Elementary Rules

Build an experiment runner