Rulette

Rulette (Rule+Roulette) is a generative artwork showcasing the wildly varied complex patterns that arise from the simple deterministic rule system of an outer-totalistic cellular automaton (CA), starting from a simple initial state where several non-zero cells -- which act as nucleation sites for pattern growth -- are positioned around a circle. The first twenty five steps of the CA evolution are shown sequentially in a grid, with the center cell update rules for each of the eighteen 9-neighbor configurations shown at the top.

This project is meant to invoke the spirit of discovery and fascination I experienced at the Wolfram (NKS) Summer School and the late nights of coding to "explore the computational universe" with fellow instructors and students. It was my gateway into generative art.

Tips on minting with params: Although I have filtered out rules that lead to 'trivial' behavior (i.e. evolving to static or homogenous states of 0s or 1s), there are still over 100K rules to explore. Pull up the params page and randomly shuffle through the rules (the 'Roulette' in the name). As you do this dozens of times, your reflex pattern detection and novelty seeking will become engaged and some rules will really jump out at you. Hit the save button, since you will likely never see the same rule again otherwise. Before you mint, be sure to hit the hash refresh button at the top, which will shuffle through different initial configurations.

Parameters / features (controllable by the minter)

• Display theme: Light or Dark
• CA Rule Index: index into the filtered set of rules -- I have filtered out rules that lead to trivial behavior, and thus have a reduced array of allowed rules. NOTE: this is not the actual rule number (it is given as a feature, see below).

Additional features

• Nucleation sites: this is the number of non-zero cells in the initial state, which are distributed evenly (with some random jitter) around a circle. Has values between 2 and 8.
• CA Rule Number: this is the rule number using the Wolfram rule numbering system. (Note: the Game of Life is an outer-totalistic 9-neighbor CA, and is rule 224, however it has been excluded in this work since that rule does not support the very sparse initial state used here).
• CA Rule Binary: this is the binary representation of the rule number -- it encodes the center cell update rule for each of the 18 neighborhood configurations, which is depicted visually at the top of the page.

Interactivity
Manga mode: press 'm' (desktop) to toggle between left-to-right vs right-to-left sequential reading order.
Press 's' (desktop) or tap (mobile) to save a high-res PNG (3000x3000).
Press 'v' (desktop) to save an SVG file.

Built using p5.js. Also uses the p5.js-svg library.
Created in May 2023 by @jamieinfinity (Jamie Williams).