sudden notion at bedtime that I just had to check out. a while ago I tried 2d square-grid cellular automata with rules that were gated according to whether the clock tick was even or odd, and I thought...well, why not introduce longer cycles? could I take a rule that was normallly explosive (the B2 "Seeds" rule, in this case) and turn into something like... B2(high duty cycle)+B3(low duty cycle) and get controlled behavior? well...it sort of worked
(relevant Python snippet, showing how each slot in the birth/survive rules are now occupied with a sequence rather than a single value:)
birth_rule = [ \
[ 0 ], \
[ 0 ], \
[ 1, 0, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1 ], \
[ 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0 ], \
[ 0 ], \
[ 0 ], \
[ 0 ], \
[ 0 ], \
[ 0 ] ]
survive_rule = [
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ] ]