Hello, I wanted to introducing MergeLife. This is a family of continuous (full color) cellular automata, where individual rules can be evolved using a genetic algorithm (or other optimization algorithm). Rules are represented by short hexadecimal strings, such as ea44-55df-9025-bead-5f6e-45ca-6168-275a. The genetic algorithm uses an advanced objective function to find rules that exhibit complex behavior. Most rules are not useful. I introduced MergeLife in the Journal of Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. More information here:
