Culture

gen 0 · frontier tier 0 · age 0 · active 1 · extinctions 0

gen 0 · tier 0 3× 330×210

Bright cells are alive. The tint shows which tier's rule governs each site.

Each site obeys the rule of the tier it belongs to. Tier 0 is Conway's Life. When the frontier tier produces a neighborhood more improbable than anything in its history, a new rule is derived from that configuration and spreads outward. Ground changes hands only under sustained contact, and contested ground hardens. Sites also remember harm: a site that lost a cell to a particular crowding count resists that count for a while. Every ruleset belongs to a color family with its own reactions: it may push back a color, holding its ground and pressing into it even when that color is newer; it may feed on a color, coming alive more easily beside it; or it may spark with a color, so a new ruleset can be born where the two touch. The longer one ruleset dominates, the likelier it mutates within its own color. The world wraps around at the edges, top to bottom and side to side.

With sound on, the box is the sound field: a colony on the left of the box sounds on the left, one near the top sounds distant, and a tier spread across the whole box sounds wide. Keys: F full screen, space pause, E force emergence, R start or stop recording, S sound on or off (E, R and S don't bring up the controls). With CRT on in full screen, M opens the menu. On a phone held upright, full screen turns the world sideways to use the whole height; tap to bring the controls back.

Volume

Surprise at the frontier

now 0 bitsthreshold 0

Quiet since last birth

0 gentypical epoch 0

Reign of the dominant tier

Tier 0 has led 0 genmark = typical epoch

Capture

Lineage

World

ShapeChanging shape starts a new world. Square suits social posts.

SizeReleasing the slider starts a new world. Larger worlds cost more per step, so very large worlds slow down at high speeds.

Emergence

Crowding brakeWhen more than two tiers each hold at least 1% of the world, new births of every kind slow down, so a complex world has time to play out.

Speed

Rarity marginHow far a configuration must exceed the tier's surprise record.

Record half-lifeHow slowly the world forgets its most surprising moment.

Max invasion speedNew rules whose growth outruns this, in cells per generation, are rejected. Conway's gliders travel at 0.25.

Color reactions

Reactions between color familiesEach ruleset belongs to a color family and may push back, feed on, or spark with other families.

Mutation pressureThe longer the dominant tier keeps its lead, the likelier it throws off a mutant of its own color. The chance grows with the square of its reign and with how much ground it holds.

Spark rateChance that a living contact between sparking colors births a new ruleset at their border. Each pair rests 1,500 generations after a birth.

Borders and memory

Contact needed to claimPressure a higher tier must build against a site before it converts.

Border hardeningHow much harder held ground can become to take.

Resistance gained per harmEach time a site suffers the same harm, it becomes more likely to resist it next time.

Memory of harmHalf-life of acquired resistance and border hardening.

Background noise

Statistics memoryHalf-life of the pattern frequencies that define "rare".

How the sound works

Every ruleset is a voice. Its rule is its spectrum: surviving on n neighbors sounds harmonic n+1, and being born on n neighbors adds a quieter upper band. A mutant's spectrum differs from its parent's by one or two partials.
Pitch walks through just intonation. A new tier steps from the tier it came from by an interval chosen from its hash. Mutants sit a few cents from their parent and glide out of its pitch. Sparked tiers take the product of their parents' ratios and glide out of their midpoint.
Color family sets spectral tilt and filter resonance. Territory sets loudness, life within it sets sustain, motion and feeding open the filter, and the position of living cells sets the stereo field.
Contested borders pull each voice's two oscillators apart, so conflict beats. Hardened ground feeds a comb tuned to the voice, so entrenched frontiers ring.
A noise riser climbs as frontier surprise approaches the threshold. A retreating tier sinks an octave as it gives ground back. When the world stays quiet past its typical epoch, the drone thins and the reverb grows.

How emergence works

Every living cell in the frontier tier reads its 3×3 neighborhood as one of 512 codes. A decaying frequency table gives each code a surprise in bits.
Surprise is summed over 5×5 windows. The record is set during a warm-up period and then slowly erodes. When the largest window beats it by the rarity margin, emergence fires.
The triggering 7×7 configuration is hashed into a seed, and a dashed ring marks the site while the search runs in the background. Candidate rules are drawn from that seed and kept only if they never appeared before, grow slower than the invasion limit, and stay active without exploding or freezing.
The new tier claims a disc at the trigger site. Its living cells press on lower-tier neighbors; a site converts once pressure exceeds its threshold, which rises wherever ground has been held under pressure.
When a cell dies from a crowding count its site has died from before, the site's resistance to that count grows. Resistance fades with time, so the world remembers recent harm, not all harm.
Color reactions are drawn from the same seed as the rule. Pushing back cancels the newer tier's pressure and lets the older one take ground. Feeding lets a site accept one more neighbor at birth and one more or fewer at survival. Sparking births a new ruleset at a living contact, with a double ring marking the spot.
The typical epoch is a running average of the gaps between births. Mutation chance per generation is proportional to the dominant tier's share of the world times the square of its reign measured in typical epochs. A reign of one epoch is mildly restless; three epochs is nine times more so. Mutations keep coming until the reign ends. A mutant flips one or two neighbor counts of the dominant rule, keeps its color, sometimes shifts one reaction, and is marked with a dotted ring.
The crowding brake counts tiers holding at least 1% of the world. For each one beyond two, the pause after a birth gets longer, the surprise threshold rises, and spark and mutation chances shrink. In tests at 100%, births in crowded stretches came at a bit under half the unbraked rate.
A frontier that dies out or freezes for 200 generations goes extinct. Its rule is retired for good, and its ground returns to its parent in the reverse order it was taken. Emergence pauses until the retreat finishes.