Cellular Automata : Swarmbots

Anyone who messes about with this truly remarkable online cellular-automata lab, who also collected seashells when they were a kid (like someone not a million miles away from here), will automatically recognise a lot of the patterns.

Cellular automata… I couldn’t find a definition that wasn’t ridiculously verbose… but if you get cells on a grid that exhibit certain colour-changing behaviours depending on what their neighbours colours are, then you get cool patterns.

This can be an analogue for life… if a cell has two neighbours, it breeds (ie: turns on), if it has 4 neighbours, its resources are used up so it dies (ie:turns off). Some of the patterns made by these things are quite beautiful – you really need to mess with the site above to get an idea… because they aren’t static – they move and grow and change etc.

Obviously the first thing you’ll want to do when you learn all this is to go off and make a cellular-automata tea-cosey

and luckily someone’s provided instructions at the link above.

Anyway, the reason I started thinking about these again, is that there’s an subculture of robot-making called swarm-bots, which are quite interesting… and these are basically mechanical cellular automata.

Hod Lipson has a talk about experimenting with them here

And as he says, replication is its own reward.

As ever, there are loads of examples on youtube

A way to go yet, but you get the idea… what these things are potentially, are memospheres where humans aren’t part of the loop.