OCA Book

[hibiscus]

As suggested by NimbleRogue earlier today, here is a thread for the OCA book. The working title for the book is A World of Cellular Automata: Beneath the Surface. Most of the development of the book has been taking place here, so I recommend you join it if you want extra context: https://discord.gg/8fm2zpkufF

This thread is intended for more formal discussion regarding the OCA book.

Edit (2026/04/04 09:00): Almost forgot: https://genevei.github.io/ocabook/index.html
This is where the book can be downloaded once the second volume has been finalized.

Edit 2 (2026/10/21 20:35): Username change

[R2INT]

My recommendation is to have two sections for the book: the first one discusses the general techniques applied to OCA and the second describes how those techniques are applied to specific OCA rules.

[hibiscus]

I have been procrastinating on the OCA book for about two weeks... I personally find that I work faster with deadlines. My original plan was to release the book on April 1st as an April Fools prank, and I got to work starting on March 20th with this sole purpose in mind. As I realized people genuinely wanted to contribute to an OCA book, though, my plans were shelved.

Anyway, here's the planned Table of Contents:

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0. Introduction
1. The Square Tiling
1.1 The von Neumann Neighbourhood
1.2 The Moore Neighbourhood
1.2.1 Outer-Totalistic Rules
1.2.2 Isotropic Non-Totalistic Rules
1.2.3 Anisotropic Rules
1.3 Other Rules
1.3.1 Langton's Ant and Turmites
2. The Hexagonal Tiling
3. The Triangular Tiling
3.1 Emulation of Hexagonal Rules
4. Other Tilings
5. Extensions
5.1 Larger than Life
5.1.1 HROT
5.2 Generations
5.3 Alternating Rules

[unname4798]

Improvements:

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1.0 The One-Dimensional Neighborhood
1.2.(1.5) Semi-Totalistic Rules
1.3.2 WireWorld & Variants
1.3.3 Colorized Life
1.3.4 Hybrid Life
1.3.5 Double & Triple Life
1.4 Emulation of Hexagonal Rules (Square Tiling)
1.5 Emulation of Triangular Rules
5.4 History & Super
5.5 Investigator

[1and0nlycordershippr]

How about this:

Code: Select all

0. Introduction
1. The Square Tiling
1.1 The von Neumann Neighbourhood
1.2 The Moore Neighbourhood
1.2.1 Outer-Totalistic Rules
1.2.2 Isotropic Non-Totalistic Rules
1.2.3 Anisotropic/MAP Rules
1.2.4 Generations
1.2.4.1 Classic Generations
1.2.4.2 Isotropic Non-Totalistic Generations
2. Other Cellular Automata
2.1 Larger Than Life
2.1.1 Classic LtL
2.1.2 Custom and weighted neighborhoods
2.2 Margolus Neighborhood CA
2.3 PCA
2.4 Wolfram's 1D CA
2.5 Langton's Ant
2.6 Rules with circuitry
2.7 History, Super, Investigator
3. Different tilings
3.1 Triangular neighborhood
3.2 Hexagonal neighborhood

[hibiscus]

The Life natural object synthesis project has mostly ran its course, so I'm switching back to focusing on AWoCA again...
There have been a ton of new developments, relating to the rulespaces the book is planning to cover, and my interest in getting the book finished instead of dilly-dallying indefinitely like I did the last time has been revitalized.

[TheWayOfTheCon]

Nice to see this project coming back to life (no pun intended).

I'm curious, how will the book be structured? Will it feel more like a journey or more like a rulespace encyclopedia?

[hibiscus]

The preliminary structure of the book was one section dedicated for theory and another for practice, but this doesn't cover the true depth of what I want to cover. Obviously the book has to both complement the Life book in some way *and* be its own standalone book, and I am also thinking of including a much broader coverage of CA (history, software, "meta" aspects in a sense) than is written in the ToCs.

[hibiscus]

Extremely dry version of AWoCA showing what my planned structure looks like in practice
https://genevei.github.io/ocabook/main2.pdf
My TeXworks is admittedly underconfigured, so I'll have to fix the issues with the bibliography (and adjust the aesthetics of the book) soon

The Langton's Ant and Termite cases are a little fuzzy, which made me deliberate on them for a few hours (which is why they aren't apart of this particular PDF)