Heaton CA

HeatonCA puts a cellular-automata research project in your hands. MergeLife is a continuous-color cellular automaton whose entire physics is eight hexadecimal octets: change one digit and you get a different universe. This app runs those universes, takes them apart, and breeds new ones - entirely on your device. SIMULATOR Type or paste any MergeLife rule (32 hex digits, eight groups of four) and watch it grow from a random soup. Start, stop, single-step, reset, or roll a brand-new random rule. Pick from the presets and the named gallery rules, then save any frame worth keeping as a PNG - exports land in a HeatonCA album in your photo gallery. Cell size and animation speed are yours to set, and an optional overlay reports the generation count and frame rate while it runs. GALLERY Thirty curated rules, each with its own preview tile: Red World, the rule from the paper, followed by Pen and Ink, Brushfire, Beetle Meadow, High Noon, Lagoons, Frost, Lichen, Plankton, Neon Storm, Coral Bloom, Emeralds, Mood Ring, and seventeen more that go by their hex alone. Tap one and it opens in the simulator, already running. RULE DECODER A MergeLife rule is not a black box. The decoder compiles the current rule and shows all eight sub-rules in one table: the promoted high limit, the neighbor sum range each sub-rule claims, the key color it merges toward, the merge percentage, the color index, and the two raw octets the numbers came from. It is the fastest way to understand why a rule behaves the way it does - and to see what your own edit actually changed. EVOLVE Run the genetic algorithm that found many of the gallery rules. It scores every candidate with the aesthetic objective from the 2018 paper - rewarding worlds that keep moving without dissolving into noise or freezing - and reports the run number, evaluation count, evaluations per minute, the current rule and score, and how close the run is to giving up. Rules that clear your score threshold are kept in a finds gallery you can reopen, export as PNG, or clear. The search pauses when you leave the app and picks up where it stopped. THE PAPER HeatonCA implements the automaton and the objective function described in: Heaton, J. (2018). Evolving continuous cellular automata for aesthetic objectives. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-018-9336-1 The same engine runs on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and the web, and it is deterministic: a given rule and seed produce the same world on every one of them. PRIVACY Everything happens on your device. No account, no sign-in, no ads, no in-app purchases, no analytics, and no data collected of any kind - nothing you do here leaves your phone. The app works offline, always. Free and open source: https://github.com/jeffheaton/mergelife