I'm trying to understand the NLUKY rules... I think I've almost got it, but one thing is throwing me off: if Conway's Game of Life is NLUKY 0,3,3,2,3, how does a cell's state get back to 0 from 1? Rule 3 means that when a cell "dies" it gets set to 2, but if N = 0 then it looks like Rule 5 will never kick in and the cell will be stuck at 2 permanently.

I'm guessing this is a bug in the specification of Rule #3 (newC should be 0 if the cell "dies" and N = 0), but I just wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding something.

Fourmilab is chock-full of interesting things. Be sure to check out the gravity detector, too.

And the SlideScreen screen saver for Windows is still the best slide-show screen saver on that platform, after 15 years or more.

Not to mention how interesting John Waters, the creator of the site and Autodesk founder is.

(John Walker)

Folks interested in playing with cellular automata might also be interested in the desktop application Golly (http://golly.sourceforge.net/).

Some of the scenes in the demo remind me a lot of an old "game" I played with as a kid, Burning Sand. It's a Falling Sand game.

- http://burningsand.de/

- https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Falling-sand_game