I thought this was going to be like a Game of Life variation I came up with about 15 years ago where you stack multiple layers of 2D Cellular Automata, allow each layer to have their own rule set, do single steps of each and then define the interactions between the layer as applying Boolean operations before doing the next step (e.g. set layer 1 = 1 xor 2, layer 2 = 1 xnor 2).
I'm pretty sure that's effectively a subset of what you can encode with a multi-state CA (you can after all interpret each layer as a "bit", so e.g. with two layers each point can be in "four states", meaning any give combination of rulesets ber layer + masking operation should have an equivalent four-state CA, but I never bothered to figure out how one would map from one to the other, and then the hard drive where the code was stored crashed so I forgot about it.
o
o o
o
Very interesting visualization either way!
O O to OOO and back again. O
I've been playing with a similar system but designed for 3d printing, it's simple to make it self-supporting by just drawing a line from each parent to each child which is neat.
The link was broken indeed. Should be fixed now. Glad you like it!
I think the only change I'd make really is to give the top layer and obviously different colour so you can view from the top and see the current configuration. Currently it just looks confusing because e.g. a - oscillator looks like + instead.
One from 2 weeks ago: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DUxkEiWDS-q/
I'm sure there is much older.
I highly doubt I was the first one (and I mean that was 4 years ago so the one from 2018 definitely precedes it), however it had a bunch of extra features like colors associated with the initial states and the colors would also propagate and merge alongside the cells
The one posted to HN is better in several ways, but I was mainly interested in learning about 3Delight.
I'm really curious what bigger hashlife patterns would look like (metacell, etc.) but the visualization gets tricky with that many objects.