Bio

Jesse Nochella is a high school student from New Sharon, Maine. For the past two years he has been active on the NKS forum, asking questions, and performing NKS experiments. When he is not working on his computer or talking about NKS, he has been busy with extracurricular activities including robotics, theater, canoeing, civic volunteering, and snowboarding.

Project: Heterogeneous Cellular Automata

An ordinary cellular automaton operates by applying a single specific transformation to every one of its parts in a uniform manner. An alteration of this setup is explored under the name of so-called heterogeneous cellular automata. A heterogeneous cellular automaton is allowed to have multiple rules operating in the same CA space. The simplest of these cases were investigated, consisting only of elementary cellular automata and up to two adjacent cells running a different rule. After searching the space of these possibilities, interesting behavior was found.

Favorite Four-Color, Nearest-Neighbor, Totalistic Rule

Rule chosen: 178738

I chose totalistic rule 178738. A string of random initials on a white background yields less chaotic behavior than a string of fixed initial conditions. The reverse case is usually what happens.