FunnyBeginner wrote:Do you know any interessting rules where only a few patter[n]s are discovered?
There are 2^18 different
outer totalistic 2D cellular automata rules, so there are undoubtedly lots of interesting rules out there waiting to be explored.
If you want to limit your focus to just rules that someone else has already shown an interest in, you might want to look at the
Other Cellular Automata board on this forum. Quite a few of the titles are "B-something/S-something", signifying various Life-like rules.
The potential audience does tend to be rather small for any given rule, of course: with 2^18 "simple" outer-totalistic rules, and a much larger rule space available with Golly's rule tables and three or more states, it's hard to spend much time on any one rule. This is no doubt why there's been several orders of magnitude more research done on B3/S23, Conway's Life, than any other similar rule. Probably 40 years of research into HighLife or Day and Night, or any rule that similarly surfs the edge of order and chaos, would have resulted in a similar set of "universal toolkits" for computation and/or construction in those rules.
-- Does anyone know, by the way, whether any other simple outer-totalistic rule is known to support universal computation circuitry using only stable patterns, as B3/S23 can do with Herschel circuitry? Seems as if it should be possible to come up with a universal stable toolkit at least for HighLife and a few other well-known rules, but to my uncertain knowledge, B3/S23 is still alone in having a p1 computational toolkit.
For a few very-near-Conway rules the problem might even be trivial -- there might be enough known B3/S23 Herschel conduits that work without modification at B38/S23, for example, to make a universal set. But that's kind of cheating...!
Anyway, that might be something interesting to look for in other rules -- still lifes and oscillators that can be combined and built up into more complex signal-processing circuitry.
FunnyBeginner wrote:And how can a save the rule into Golly-Code, so you dont have to set the 3/3 rule manually?
You've done that correctly already. The "rule = B3/S3" in the first line of the RLE will automatically change the rule, as long as Golly's universe is empty (unless you change Golly's default settings, anyway.) You can also open the clipboard with Ctrl+Shift+O, and the rule will change for sure.
