Elementary Elements

Hello and welcome back to the weekly...

🗻🐸 TODEPOND TIMES 🐸🗻

The todes have been busy... What's new this week?

Symmetry Circles

I've been working hard on making the next video! I've been getting closer to finishing the engine! (which will be up at cellpond.cool - currently very buggy)

You can now attach 'symmetry circles' to rules. They help you when you want to make an element behave in a symmetrical way. For example, you might want to make sand randomly slide either left or right. Or... you might want to make a fly that flies around in any random direction.

There are three different symmetries you can pick from:
→ X-Reflection
→ Y-Reflection
→ Rotation

And you combine them together too! (if you want)

The next thing to make is... letting you combine together different cells. This will let you make more complicated splitting and merging shenanigans! When that's done, then I'll be able to make a lot of fun stuff (hopefully). I'm looking forward to it!

Elementary

I've started making things for the next-next video. (Not the next one, but the one after that!) As voted for, it's going to be about ✨ New Cellular Automata. The big twist of it will be that none of the cellular automata will be entirely new. Instead, they will be new takes on past cellular automata. I guess you could consider them 'parodies' of cellular automata.

To get started, I've been making a parody of Stephen Wolfram's elementary cellular automata. These are often stated to be the 'simplest' cellular automata out there. But I reckon you can make a simpler one (maybe)! Let me explain...

-- TECHNICAL STUFF INCOMING --

In Wolfram's elementary cellular automata, every CELL is represented by a 1 or a 0. Every frame, they get updated according to the RULES. The rules tell you what different arrangements of cells change into.

For example, you could say:
If there are three zeroes in a row (111) the one in the middle changes into a (0).
111 → 0

You could do this for all the different possible arrangements of cells.
111 → 0
110 → 0
101 → 0
100 → 1
011 → 0
010 → 0
001 → 1
000 → 0

If you run these rules, and draw each frame on a new line you get a nice pattern! The ruleset I listed above is called rule 18. It's called rule 18 because if you line up all the rules in order (00010010) and read the number as binary... you get the number 18!

In total, there are 256 rules! These are sometimes known as Wolfram Codes. Well... how about... Wilson Codes! (non-humbly named)

Wilson codes are simpler(?) because they look at the arrangement of 2 cells (instead of 3). This means that the lines don't line up so neatly, but that's fine with me. Here's a Wilson code rule:
00 → 0
01 → 1
10 → 1
11 → 0

That's Wilson code 6! (There are only 16 Wilson code rules in total)

I've started to put up my code for these little experiments at github.com/TodePond/NewPond

-- TECHNICAL STUFF FINISHED --

Thank you very much for supporting me with all of these projects! I hope you're looking forward to what's coming in future videos! Please feel free to join us in our semi-secret discord server (if you want). See you next week! 🐸🗻