Erik Michaelson

← Writing · CELLAGA

One Bit Short of a War

Why classic Conway can't host a fight, and how one extra bit of state turns Life into a war.

Published · Updated · cellaga

Ship, bullets, and enemies are all live cells in one cellular automaton. Why classic Conway can’t host a fight, and how one extra bit turns Life into a war.

Life, in two clauses

Each cell alive or dead. Each tick, eight neighbors, rule B3/S23: dead cell with exactly 3 live neighbors is Born; live cell with 2 or 3 Survives; else dead.

FIG. 01

The complete rulebook

BIRTH — B3dead center, 3 neighbors→ born next tickSURVIVAL — S23alive, 2 (or 3) neighbors→ survivesDEATH — everything elseunder 2 (lonely) · over 3 (crowded)→ dead next tick
The complete rulebook. Every pattern you have ever seen in Life — gliders, guns, computers — is downstream of these three panels.

Click/drag to paint. Presets: glider (swims — Cellaga’s bullets), pulsar (period-3 oscillator — the ship), R-pentomino (methuselah, ~1,100 generations of chaos), soup (random noise → ash).

click / drag to paint · edges wrap
gen 0 · pop 0

Why classic Life can’t host a fight

Fly a glider into a pulsar: cells die, cells born, chaos. Whose cells? Did the bullet damage the ship or the ship absorb the bullet? Kill credit?

One bit — alive or dead. Identity isn’t in the rules. Two patterns touch and become the grid. No ownership → no damage attribution, no score, no “your ship.”

Ownership outside the sim in game code fakes collisions. Ownership has to live in the automaton and propagate by its rules.

Immigration: one extra bit

Immigration Game (early Life-hacking era): two colors — amber and cyan. Counting unchanged: birth needs exactly 3 live neighbors of any color, survival 2-or-3. New clause: newborn takes majority color of its three parents. Three parents → majority always exists.

FIG. 02

The whole diff

MAJORITY BIRTH — 2v13 parents: 2 amber, 1 cyan→ amber childMAJORITY BIRTH — flippedsame geometry, colors swapped→ cyan childSURVIVAL — color keepsa surviving cell never converts —only births carry the flag forward
The whole diff. Counting ignores color; only newborns consult it. Squint — ignore the colors entirely — and every panel is just classic Life.

Immigration projects onto classic Life exactly. Erase colors → identical evolution. Known oscillators, spaceships, and guns work unmodified; color is a tracer through unchanged physics.

Paint both teams or load presets: glider duel (head-on; ash has owners), pulsar under fire (Cellaga in miniature), border war (half-and-half soup).

click / drag paints the selected team · edges wrap
gen 0 · 0 v 0

What the flag buys

Damage: health is pattern integrity — Hamming distance to the pulsar’s canonical form. Conversion: contested borders flip territory via majority birth. Readability: every pixel of ash has an owner.

One impurity: before each generation, tagged cells translate rigidly with input — ship moves because you moved it, then the universe ticks. Everything else is B3/S23 + majority birth.