so, I tried to put our wild idea into effect! the general idea at work here: instead of having all the cells in a 2D grid operating by the same ruleset for a "Conway's Life"-style cellular automaton, cells can obey different rules. if a cell is born or survives into the next iteration, the rule that determines this is chosen by majority vote of the surrounding cells, with an arbitrary tiebreaking method (it depends on the clock tick of the simulation).
so here, for example, the red cells are running on the rules for Conway's Life; the green cells are using "Pedestrian Life"; and the blue cells are using the "2x2" algorithm (you can look all those up here: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/List_of_Life-like_rules)
I was hoping to see complex interplay among competing rules, maybe even with stable patterns that worked with multiple rules at once, but mostly there's a sort of territoriality that happens and one ruleset comes to take over most of the field. in this one anyway there's significant survival of all three.
written in C and SDL2. I started out using the mingw64 tools but they seem a bit flaky; the above image was captured after we switched to using the Windows Linux Subsystem and the VcXsrv X server to display the graphics.
