Wireworld

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-08T15:24:02Z

A link to this Wikipedia page on Wireworld appeared the other day on Hacker News. I've been a bit distracted by reading up on it.

I like cellular automata, and I implemented Life once, but no cellular automata has really fascinated me as much as Wireworld is right now. It looks circuit'y. You can build a working computer in it and the final result does look very similar to a circuitboard.

Apparently Golly can be used to simulate it, and is free software. I haven't gotten it to build on my GuixSD machine yet though.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠), Charles Stanhope, Marcel van der Boom likes this.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) shared this.

This looks so awesome. Incredible what can be done with such simple rules.

Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) at 2016-07-11T05:55:45Z

haven't seen that before so don't really know the context but that image in the wikipedia page make me think that xor gate might do something like ring modulation

as in

in a frequency domain view -- the output might be mostly contain sum and difference of the input frequencies rather than the input frequencies

just a guess

Michael at 2016-07-11T06:46:52Z

@Michael The rules are pretty simple and have more to do with the "flow" on the grid than anything resembling real electricity. In the XOR, having three electrons on the "output" side more or less blocks the electrons from flowing through the section.

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-11T15:28:11Z

But maybe those ideas informed the design! I know almosth nothing about that stuff :)

Christopher Allan Webber at 2016-07-11T15:31:39Z