Digital Life 05: Kill It

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:34:00 +0100

We have been too kind to our systems.

So far we have:

That is a dangerous way to study anything that looks life-like.

A structure that persists when nothing interferes with it may be interesting.

But biological systems do something harder.

They persist in a world that keeps interfering with them.

Cellular Automata From First Principles 34: Damage, Robustness and Persistence

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:03:00 +0100

A pattern that survives in perfect conditions is only the beginning.

A stronger artificial-life question is:

What happens when the pattern is disturbed?

We can turn that into an experiment.

Start with a rectangular ablation:

def damage_rectangle(state, y0, y1, x0, x1):
    damaged = state.copy()
    damaged[..., y0:y1, x0:x1] = 0.0
    return damaged

For a single-channel state:

damaged = damage_rectangle(state, 55, 70, 55, 70)

For multi-channel state, the ellipsis damages all channels in the same spatial region.