Unlimited Automata

Twelve families of cellular automata.

Conway's Game of Life is one rule in one family of twelve. Browse them, draw into any of them, and wind any generation back.

Coming soon to the App Store for Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Mac iPhone iPad

Twelve families

• Life — Conway, HighLife, Day & Night, Seeds, and the rest of the birth-and-survival space.
• Non-totalistic rules and other lattices — neighbour position matters; the grid can be square or hexagonal.
• Generations and Larger than Life — cells fade over time; bigger neighbourhoods make swimming blobs.
• All 256 Wolfram rules — one row of cells, time running down the screen.
• Turmites, reversible blocks, and WireWorld — Langton's ant, rules that run backwards, and a grid wired for logic.
• Excitable media, sandpiles, forest fires — spirals, avalanches, and spreading fire.
• Continuous fields — Lenia, SmoothLife, and Gray–Scott.

Watch it, and wind it back

• The slider seeks — drag it back and the earlier generation returns exactly.
• A frame at a time — step forward or back, or run from a crawl to a blur.
• Move around — pinch to zoom, drag to pan, tap to frame the pattern.

What it can tell you

• Measure — the rule, and the population, bounds, and activity on the canvas.
• Identify — a spaceship, its period, and how far it travels each cycle.
• A shelf of discoveries — the R-pentomino, acorn, diehard, the Gosper glider gun, and dozens more.

Make things and keep them

• Draw in any model — a brush, patterns to load, and random soup.
• Build rules — birth and survival by hand, and the numbers behind every other model.
• Open what exists — RLE, MCell, macrocell, plaintext, Life 1.05 and 1.06, and rule tables.
• Save and export — a document you can reopen, or SVG, PNG, or RLE.
• Seven themes, and age colouring — newborn cells hot, still life cold, so motion shows without changing a cell.

One purchase, every device