cellular automata
Cellular Automatas demonstrate emergent properties from simple rules.
A well known example is John Conway’s game of life; a 2D automata where each
cell is either “dead” or “alive” based on the state of its immediate neighbours.
elementary
A more fundamental set of automata are elementary cellular automatas.
These are a set of 256 one dimensional automata referred to by their “Wolfram
code”.
Each generation of a given automata can be stacked on top of each other,
forming a 2D texture where the y-axis represents time.
By altering the initial starting comditions (a single “alive” cell, a random
sequence, etc.) each rule can display variuos sets of behaviours
multiple states
The complexity of a given automata can be increased by giving each cell more than two states and supplying a rule set that takes that into account.
different rules
While the rules for the elementary cellular automata are based on specific
configurations, a totalistic cellular automata instead focuses on the total
number of active cells.
Conway’s Life
This concept is more well known as John Conway’s game of life; a 2D automata
where the rules for each cell are based on population count rather than a
specific configuration.
Like the Chip8 interpreter, Conway’s life has been ported to many different
systems, using many different languages.
Langton’s Ant
An alternative type of rule set can be implemented by focusing on a single cell via a pointer, usually referred to as a “turmite”. Langton’s Ant is the most basic form of these “turmites”.
When the turmite enters a cell, the cell is advanced to the next colour in the chain. The turmite then turns clockwise or anti-clockwise (depending on the rule set) and moves forward to the next cell.