Autonomous Chipsets

Cellular automaton forming ever-evolving chipset structures. Watch the automaton construct increasingly complex connections and paths until it become unrecognizable from mere noise.

This piece is based on a variation of a cyclic cellular automata (CCA).
CCA's are systems in which each cell may only increase its state if a certain number of neighbor cells have a state-value exactly one higher than itself. The number of possible states can be arbitrarily defined. Moreover, the states are modular, meaning cells cycle back to the first state after reaching the highest possible state.

In this variation, there are four automata running simultaneously across the whole grid. Each automaton has its own ruleset and number of states causing different behaviors. However, the rulesets can also influence each other, allowing even more complex behavior to emerge. These rulesets are more diverse than in traditional CCAs, in that different state changes are allowed to occur if the number of neighbors with a higher state exceeds a certain threshold. Additionally, state changes are not restricted to be simple incrementations, but also allow operations such as substracting, multiplying and division. Values may be any of the other state values of the cell itself or its neighbors.

This allows extremely complex behavior to emerge but also means that this automaton was very difficult to tame and to produce any aesthetically pleasing results.

This iteration was achieved by using a genetic algorithm with myself being the judge of fitness, to continuously mutate and improve on past iterations. After analyzing 100s of different rulesets, I found this variation. What followed was (a lot) of fine-tuning by hand until reaching this final product.

Code: https://github.com/Bewelge/CCA-WebGL
Preview with settings: https://bewelge.github.io/CCA-WebGL/

7 different color palettes.

Controls:
Space - Pause/Unpause
Up/down - Increase/Decrease blending
S - Download image
F - Fill window
R - Raw shader output
D - Restart automaton
N - Restart with new starting pattern

Created in Javascript with Three.js

Requires WebGL and a decent device to run. Please check that it runs on your device before minting.