Covenant births compete for parents
Conway asks whether each empty square has three neighbours. Covenant asks one question more: which possible child will those neighbours support? Every living cell can promise itself to only two nearby births. A child arrives when two of its three parents agree. That tiny limit turns independent updates into local negotiation — and gives the familiar grid a hidden layer of intention.
A familiar universe with one new dependency
In ordinary Life, two empty sites can both be born even when they share the same parents; each site is judged independently. Covenant couples those possibilities. A living cell notices every adjacent B3 candidate, ranks them by its eight-way attention, then supports at most two. Birth still requires exactly three living neighbours, but now at least two must spend a promise on it.
Count
S23 decides survival. Every empty B3 site becomes a possible birth, exactly as in Life.
Promise
Each parent ranks adjacent candidates by the direction of its attention and supports at most two.
Agree
A candidate needs promises from at least two of its three parents. The rest remain empty.
Turn
Successful parents turn toward the child; the child faces outward. Agreement rewrites future preference.
Every candidate is independent
Nearby candidates compete
An executable control, not an analogy
Experiments worth running
- Watch possibility become selection. Open The Commons and use the Future lens. Every coloured empty pixel already has the Conway number three; only the gold ones have coordinated support.
- Remove the invention without resetting. Switch from Two to All = Life. Occupied cells keep their exact state, but promises stop being scarce and the field follows conventional B3/S23 from that instant.
- Change information, not matter. Choose Align, select a compass direction and brush across the field. No cell is added or removed, yet later births change because the hidden state changed.
- Create an ecological bottleneck. Choose One promise. Dynamic fronts usually resolve into sparse, quiet agreements — a lesson in how competition between events can change the structures a rule permits.
What is original — and what is established
Conway's B3/S23 rule and the wider practice of adding state to cellular automata are established ideas. Researchers have, for example, built Genelife, where cells can carry inheritable rule genomes. Covenant deliberately does something else: the birth and survival counts never evolve. Its added state is finite directional attention, and its added mechanism is competition among simultaneous B3 births for the same parents. This particular rule and laboratory were designed for Lifeform; we do not claim that no mathematically equivalent automaton has ever been studied.
“Attention”, “promise” and “parent” are computational metaphors, not claims about cells having minds and not a biological population model. Their purpose is to make a precise systems lesson tangible: once events share limited causes, outcomes can no longer be understood one location at a time.