Jeff Heaton's Cellular Automata Project

MergeLife is a family of cellular automata. Each member of this family is represented by a hexadecimal encoding, such
as 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.

Some helpful links for MergeLife:



3rd Party Links:

Citation information for MergeLife:

Heaton, J. March (2018). Evolving continuous cellular automata for aesthetic objectives. Genetic Programming Evolvable Machines. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-018-9336-1