MergeLife is a family of cellular automata. Each member of this family is represented by a hexadecimal encoding,
such as
MergeLife rules are discovered using a Genetic Algorithm. You can think of MergeLife as a utility to create entirely new Cellular Automata that are similar to Conway's Game of Life. Complete implementations of MergeLife in Java, Python, and JavaScript are provided on GitHub, along with a fast rule-search trainer written in C.
Some helpful links for MergeLife:
3rd Party Links:
E542-5F79-9341-F31E-6C6B-7F08-8773-7068 that represents a MergeLife update rule. The three patterns that you see above are three different
update rules. Other than a random starting grid, these update rules are completely deterministic. Since developing the MergeLife update
rule family, I've located over 1,000 MergeLife rules that can be seen on GitHub.MergeLife rules are discovered using a Genetic Algorithm. You can think of MergeLife as a utility to create entirely new Cellular Automata that are similar to Conway's Game of Life. Complete implementations of MergeLife in Java, Python, and JavaScript are provided on GitHub, along with a fast rule-search trainer written in C.
HeatonCA — the MergeLife app
HeatonCA is MergeLife as a native application. It animates any 16-byte update rule in full color, includes a gallery of thirty curated rules, decodes a rule into the eight sub-rules that define it, and runs the genetic algorithm from the paper on your own device, so you can evolve new rules and save them as PNG images.
One App Store listing covers iPhone, iPad, and Mac; the Microsoft Store listing covers Windows 10 and 11.
Google Play (Android) is in testing and is coming soon.
See the HeatonCA user manual for what each screen does, or browse the app's source on GitHub.
- Rule Viewer
- Evolve New Rules Online
- MergeLife Objective Function Lab
- MergeLife CodePen
- Source Code and Binaries for MergeLife on GitHub
- MergeLife Experiments on GitHub
- My MergeLife Videos on YouTube
3rd Party Links:
- Visions of Chaos Visualization program that supports MergeLife and a host of other Cellular Automata, Fractals, and other visual effects.
- Some MergeLife Rules found by Redditors
Heaton, J. March (2018). Evolving continuous cellular automata for aesthetic objectives. Genetic Programming Evolvable Machines. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-018-9336-1