The Pnictogen Wing

the following GIF results from the rule shown below—effectively there's three sets of rules rather than one, and which set is applied depends upon the clock tick.

it's not a great innovation. most combinations I've tried either lead towards chaotic soup that never resolves into definite patterns, or a rapid die-off with only a few patterns remaining. this one, at least, produces a curious reduplicating pattern.

birth_rule = [ \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 1 ], \
    [ 0, 1, 1 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ] ]
    
survive_rule = [ \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 1, 1, 0 ], \
    [ 0, 1, 1 ], \
    [ 1, 0, 0 ], \
    [ 0, 0, 1 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ], \
    [ 0 ] ]

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:)

survive_rule = [
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ],
[ 0 ] ]

tried a dual automaton idea. there's two separate grids, but the following crossover condition is applied: if an occupied cell doesn't meet the survival condition, the cell is permitted to survive if the birth condition is satisfied on the other grid.

doing this with the Conway's Life rule rapidly causes the grid to fill up, but other rules have produced some hints of unusual behavior, like the oscillators in this animation that are anchored by a still life on the other grid. rule is B3/S35 on both grids

this is using a 14-cell neighborhood around each little right triangle in the tetrakis square tessellation (q.v. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrakis_square_tiling) and...well, I haven't gotten any long-lasting chaotic behavior yet, at least one gets some fascinating shapes out of it. ~Chara

here's one for example, using B46/S23 as the rule (with the 14-cell neighborhood shown in the second image) one obtains a variety of fast-moving spaceships from a "random" starting position.