Hex Automata: “Don't call us, we'll call you." Rule 376 + Seed 37.502

Is this rule-set interesting enough? Time will tell. If this video receives enough views & likes, the rule-set will be added to the "celebrity list". This would then qualify it for cross-breeding with other "celebrity" rule-sets. Breeding of existing rule-sets has proven to be the fastest way to produce interesting new rule-sets (ca. 10% success rate vs 0.1% for purely random searches). But in order to maintain "genetic diversity", the gene pool is kept large with over 70 different rule-sets, and occasionally purely random searches are done in order to add "new blood".
Video title inspired by Sugarloaf:
• Sugarloaf - Don't Call...
2-Dimensional cellular automata, hexagonal array,
Color-coding of cells age/life-status:
All colored cells are alive except blue-colored cells.
yellow = just born (state = 1),
red = alive 2 or more time-steps (state = 1),
blue = fading "ghost" of cell that died (state = 0),
black = empty space (state = 0),
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General Procedure:
STEP 1). Make a 2-dimensional grid (array) of "cells" which can each have a value of 0 (off/dead) or 1 (on/alive). Conway's famous "Game of Life" cellular automaton uses a square grid, but here we use a hexagonal grid (chicken-wire or honeycomb). Initialize the grid by filling it with all zeros. This is the "main grid".
STEP 2). Add a starting "seed" pattern to the main grid by changing some of the cell values to "1" (on/alive). Sometimes specific compact seeds are used, alternatively sometimes they are a random unstructured spread of ones that II call "primordial soup".
STEP 3). The program then looks at every cell in the entire main grid, one-by-one. When examining each cell, the total number of live neighbor cells is counted among its 6 immediately adjacent neighbor cells (if using "totalistic" rules). The program then consults the rule-set to decide if the central cell will be alive (1, on) or dead (0, off) in the next time-step. In order to not disturb the cell pattern that is being updating, all of these new values are accumulated on a separate "temporary grid".
STEP 4). After every cell is updated on the temporary grid, the main grid is re-initialized to all zeros, and then the temporary grid is copied to the main grid.
STEP 5). Repeat Steps 3 & 4 for hundreds or thousands of iterations. The result of each iteration serves as the input for the next iteration. The grid is finite, so the live cell pattern will eventually go repeat or go extinct, although this could take thousands of time-steps.
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Note: this "Hexagon-Multiverse" (HMCA) cellular automaton is similar to Conway's famous "Game of Life" in the sense that both are 2-dimensional, have binary cell states, and are synchronous and deterministic. But the Game of Life uses a square grid, while the HMCA uses a more natural (common in nature) and more symmetrical hexagonal grid. Additionally, the HMCA achieves interesting results using a variety of rule-sets, whereas the Game of Life is limited to a single rule-set.
Hexagonal Cell Grid: size remains constant at 80 columns x 80 rows.
Periodic boundary conditions: horizontal & vertical dimensions wrap across opposite edges, giving a topology equivalent to the 2-dimensional surface of a 3-dimensional torus (doughnut).
Neighborhood: semi-totalistic (details to be published at a future date),
Rule-set 376 full designation: 41968 - 3408 - 2484 - 27634,
This rule-set was found using the "celebrity search" method -- randomly cross-breeding existing rule-sets (popular ones, a measured by views & likes).
Time: 287 steps (display rate 5 fps). The first & final frames are shown for 1 & 2 seconds, respectively.
Live cell population: starts at 37, reaches a maximum of 1788 on time-step 181, and ends with 1410 on the final time-step 287.
Resolution: 2578 screen pixels per cell,
Program: "Hexagon-Multiverse 1.0" (unpublished), PHP language.
Platform: MacBook Pro (M1), Sonoma 14.1.1 OS, Safari 17.1 browser.

[@Illumina_Blade]

Earthbound attack animations be like.

[@doim1676]

Is that Conway's game of life but with a hexagonal board?

[@hexagon-multiverse]

It's similar to Game of Life, in that both are cellular automata. But my CA using a hexagonal grid gives a very different neighborhood (6 identical neighbors instead of 4 edge neighbors + 4 diagonal neighbors). Also, my CA can use many different sets of rules, compared to GOL which uses only one set of rules. I think the output images from my CA are more complex & organic looking too.

[@lefthand2778]

this would be killer with some royalty-free music

[@hexagon-multiverse]

Thank you for your support & suggestion. I agree that music can sometimes enhance a video (check out my "w/ music" playlist). I used music a lot in my early videos, and I still do occasionally.
But my overall experience has been that adding music often leads to decreased views (as seen when publishing the same video with & without music). I think this results mainly from 3 reasons.
1) musical tastes vary widely among the world's population, so what I like will likely be unappealing to most. 2) the UA-cam music library has been overused so that same music appears on many unrelated videos. 3) Any music added has nothing to do with the fractal itself, and is thus considered a distraction. I'm looking into using the properties of the growing fractal itself to generate "music".

[@lefthand2778]

@@hexagon-multiverse your arguments are super well laid out, honestly i have a lot of respect for that. i totally get where you're coming from.
i've never thought about using the fractal itself to generate music, but that sounds really interesting, too. i'd be interested to see where it goes. i wish you luck with everything, and i hope your channel prospers!

[@semydev]

Cool

[@vektorz1spektro557]

Cool