Bio

Liang Zhang is from Beijing, China. He spent a year from 2006 to 2007 completing his master’s degree in natural computation at the University of York, where he began to learn things like quantum computing, DNA computing, evolvable hardware, artificial immune systems, etc. Now he is a PhD student at the University of the West of England working on an Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) project that aims to build a universal chemical processor.

Project: Hexagonal 2-Color 4-Neighbor Totalistic Cellular Automata

The project is to explore a class of 2D cellular automata on a hexagonal grid, with 2-color 4-neighbor totalistic rules.

There are in total 32 rules for this class of CA. The goal is to check whether there are rules that may end up being in certain invariant configurations, exhibit any conservation laws, or have reversibility.

Project-Related Demonstrations

Hexagonal Two-Color Four-Neighbor Totalistic Cellular Automata

Favorite Radius 3/2 Rule

Rule 52419

My favorite 2-color, 3/2-radius CA is rule 52419. It has a fractal structure when evolving from the initial condition of a single black cell and the pattern grows much faster in the vertical direction than in the horizontal direction, which may look like waterfalls. When starting from a initial condition of IntegerDigits[305,2], the pattern becomes complicated and more or less looks like feathers of a peacock. When further changing the background to a periodical one, {0,1}, the pattern regains its growing speed in the horizontal direction and there emerges a flat boundary on the right-hand side. (All examples have evolved 256 steps).