In a cellular automaton, an oscillator is a pattern that returns to its original state, in the same orientation and position, after a finite number of generations. Thus the evolution of such a pattern repeats itself indefinitely. Depending on context, the term may also include spaceships as well.
Seeds is a cellular automaton in the same family as the Game of Life, initially investigated by Brian Silverman and named by Mirek Wójtowicz. It consists of infinite two-dimensional grid of cells, each of which may be in one of two states: on or off. Each cell is considered to have eight neighbors, as in Life. In each time step, a cell turns on or is "born" if it was off or "dead" but had exactly two neighbors that were on; all other cells turn off. Thus, in the notation describing the family of cellular automata containing Life, it is described by the rule B2/S.
Day and Night is a cellular automaton rule in the same family as Game of Life. It is defined by rule notation B3678/S34678, meaning that a dead cell becomes live if it has 3, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, and a live cell remains alive (survives) if it has 3, 4, 6, 7, or 8 live neighbors, out of the eight neighbors in the Moore neighborhood. It was invented and named by Nathan Thompson in 1997, and investigated extensively by David I. Bell. The rule is given the name "Day & Night" because its on and off states are symmetric: if all the cells in the Universe are inverted, the future states are the inversions of the future states of the original pattern. A pattern in which the entire universe consists of off cells except for finitely many on cells can equivalently be represented by a pattern in which the whole universe is covered in on cells except for finitely many off cells in congruent locations.
In a cellular automaton, a Garden of Eden is a configuration that has no predecessor. It can be the initial configuration of the automaton but cannot arise in any other way. John Tukey named these configurations after the Garden of Eden in Abrahamic religions, which was created out of nowhere.
A block cellular automaton or partitioning cellular automaton is a special kind of cellular automaton in which the lattice of cells is divided into non-overlapping blocks and the transition rule is applied to a whole block at a time rather than a single cell. Block cellular automata are useful for simulations of physical quantities, because it is straightforward to choose transition rules that obey physical constraints such as reversibility and conservation laws.
Rule 30 is a one-dimensional binary cellular automaton rule introduced by Stephen Wolfram in 1983. Using Wolfram's classification scheme, Rule 30 is a Class III rule, displaying aperiodic, chaotic behaviour.
A rake, in the lexicon of cellular automata, is a type of puffer train, which is an automaton that leaves behind a trail of debris. In the case of a rake, however, the debris left behind is a stream of spaceships, which are automata that "travel" by looping through a short series of iterations and end up in a new location after each cycle returns to the original configuration.
In Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automaton rules, a spark is a small collection of live cells that appears at the edge of some larger pattern such as a spaceship or oscillator, then quickly dies off.
Brian's Brain is a cellular automaton devised by Brian Silverman, which is very similar to his Seeds rule.
In a cellular automaton, a finite pattern is called a sawtooth if its population grows without bound but does not tend to infinity. In other words, a sawtooth is a pattern with population that reaches new heights infinitely often, but also infinitely often drops below some fixed value. Their name comes from the fact that their plot of population versus generation number looks roughly like an ever-increasing sawtooth wave.
Life without Death is a cellular automaton, similar to Conway's Game of Life and other Life-like cellular automaton rules. In this cellular automaton, an initial seed pattern grows according to the same rule as in Conway's Game of Life; however, unlike Life, patterns never shrink. The rule was originally considered by Toffoli & Margolus (1987), who called it "Inkspot"; it has also been called "Flakes". In contrast to the more complex patterns that exist within Conway's Game of Life, Life without Death commonly features still life patterns, in which no change occurs, and ladder patterns, that grow in a straight line.
A reversible cellular automaton is a cellular automaton in which every configuration has a unique predecessor. That is, it is a regular grid of cells, each containing a state drawn from a finite set of states, with a rule for updating all cells simultaneously based on the states of their neighbors, such that the previous state of any cell before an update can be determined uniquely from the updated states of all the cells. The time-reversed dynamics of a reversible cellular automaton can always be described by another cellular automaton rule, possibly on a much larger neighborhood.
Critters is a reversible block cellular automaton with similar dynamics to Conway's Game of Life, first described by Tommaso Toffoli and Norman Margolus in 1987.
