Investigations of Cellular Automata Dynamics

John Conway’s Game of Life was the first cellular automaton, showing how simple rules can generate amazingly complex patterns. He designed a field filled with cells, each of which could be dead or alive, and devised three rules to govern how these cells changed from one step to the next. Any living cell that had two or three living neighbor cells, out of a total of eight, survived into the next genera-tion; any dead cell that had three living neighbors was born. Conway chose these rules to provide some stability but also allow a great vari-ety of changes; I will look at many different sets of rules, both in their own stability and in their interactions with other sets