Labs
Five automata that are not Conway's Life, each with a simulator built for it specifically. They exist to make one point: Life's behaviour is remarkable, but it is not the only remarkable thing a simple rule can do. One of them is ours.
Antiot's Field
Conway's Life played on ground that can be exhausted. Every living cell grazes the square beneath it, and empty ground recovers slowly — so a still life eats its own patch and starves. Standing still is fatal. Run a random soup for long enough and the rule strips out everything that cannot move, leaving nothing but gliders circling an empty field.
Run our ruleElementary cellular automata
A single row of cells, each looking at itself and its two neighbours. There are exactly 256 possible rules and you can flip through all of them. Rule 30 generates randomness good enough to have shipped in commercial software; Rule 110 is a proven universal computer.
Open the explorerLangton's Ant
One ant walks a grid. On a white square it turns right; on a black square it turns left; either way it flips the square behind it. For ten thousand steps the result is chaos. Then, without warning, it builds a perfectly straight highway and never stops. Nobody has proved it must.
Watch it happenBrian's Brain
Add one state to Life and forbid anything from surviving: every firing cell must spend a generation dying before its square can be used again. The result is a world with almost no stationary objects - everything either travels or disappears.
Run the brainWireWorld
An automaton designed backwards from the answer. Empty space, copper wire, electron heads and electron tails - and one rule that makes electricity behave itself. People have built adders, displays and a working prime sieve out of it.
Build a circuitWhy these five
Between them they cover the ways you can change a cellular automaton and get something genuinely different: reduce the dimensions (elementary), replace the field with an agent (Langton), add states (Brian's Brain), design the rule backwards from an application (WireWorld) — or give the grid itself a state the cells depend on, which is what Antiot's Field does.
For the full survey - hexagonal lattices, Larger than Life, SmoothLife, Lenia, neural cellular automata and three-dimensional rules - see variants and other worlds.