heatonresearch/mergelife repository overview

⁠MergeLife

⁠Evolving Continuous Cellular Automata for Aesthetic Objectives

MergeLife⁠ is a full color family of cellular automata in the tradition of Conway's Game of Life⁠. Many of the cellular automata produced by MergeLife have structures similar to the gliders, guns, and spaceships from Conway's Game of Life. New cellular automata rules are produced by a Genetic Algorithm. The process of evolving new MergeLife cellular automata can be CPU-intense. This docker image contains the code needed to evolve new MergeLife cellular automata. The result of each of these cellular automata discovered is a MergeLife rule in the form E542-5F79-9341-F31E-6C6B-7F08-8773-7068. These can easily be viewed from the JavaScript viewer that can be found at the main MergeLife website⁠. This docker image has no capabilities for viewing MergeLife rules; rather, this docker image is meant to discover new MergeLife rules.

This docker image should be run with the following command:

docker run -it -v [host path]:/home/ml/output heatonresearch/mergelife

The local host path should contain one file name objective.json that contains the search parameters for the Genetic Algorithm. The reference object file is contained here⁠. The docker image will run until it is terminaned. It will place its output into the same directory as the objective.json file. Any viable rules will be stored to PNG files with the rule as the filename. These PNGs are placed in the same folder as the objective JSON file. An example of the output from a very large MergeLife run can be seen here⁠.