Hey, r/cellular_automata!

For the past months, I've been working on HexLife Explorer, and I'm excited to share it with a community that I hope would appreciate it.

>> Live Demo Here <<

This isn't just another Conway's Game of Life clone. My goal was to create a professional-grade, open-source tool for discovering and analyzing emergent behavior, specifically on a hexagonal grid.

What is it?

HexLife Explorer is an interactive simulator that lets you define and observe the rules that govern CA based life. It runs on a high-performance engine using WebGL2 for rendering and a WASM core for the simulation logic, so it's fast and runs entirely in your browser.

One of the key features is the ability to run 9 concurrent simulations at once, each with its own ruleset. This is useful for comparing subtle rule variations side-by-side or for running evolutionary experiments.

What can you do with it?

• Explore & Discover: Start with the built-in library of fascinating rulesets (from "Spontaneous Gliders" to "Lichtenberg Figures") or generate/evolve and save your own.
• Deeply Edit Rulesets: The Ruleset Editor allows you to edit each of the 128 rules individually, or use high-level modes to edit them based on neighbor count or rotational symmetry.
• Evolve New Rules: Use the Clone & Mutate function to apply evolutionary pressure to your rulesets. I've found some very interesting new patterns this way.
• Analyze Your Automata: The app includes several analysis tools:
  • Rule-Based Coloring: Cells are colored based on the specific rule that created them, giving you a visual fingerprint of the system's logic.
  • Real-time Rule Ranking: See exactly which rules are firing the most, separated by rules that activate cells vs. those that deactivate them.
  • History Plots: Track the activity ratio and entropy of your simulation over time.
• Share Your Creations: Found an interesting ruleset? Please share it with me. You can save the world's state to a file or, even better, generate a unique URL that encodes your entire setup (rules, densities, camera view) to share with others.

The project is fully open-source, and I've tried to make the code as clean as possible. You can check out the repository here

I'd love for you to try it out and see what cool discoveries you can make. Let me know what you think, and if you find any particularly interesting rules or patterns, please share them! I've also included a set of interactive tours and keyboard shortcuts (P to play/pause, G to generate, M to mutate, etc. see the readme file in the repository) to get you started.

Thanks for checking it out!

(To the mods: I know i've posted about this before, but I made a lot of progress with development since then, I hope you don't mind.)