Morley
B368/S245 — also called Move, for good reason
Unusually rich in moving patterns. Random soup here throws off spaceships and guns far more readily than Conway’s rule does.
How it works
In plain English, before the notation
Some rules produce moving patterns only if you construct them deliberately. This one produces them by accident. Drop random noise on the grid and within a few hundred steps you will be watching spaceships cross the screen, because the balance between the birth and survival conditions happens to favour patterns that translate rather than sit still.
Let the spaceships find you
- Press Soup (R) and Play. Wait for the initial burst to settle — roughly 200 steps.
- Watch the edges of the settled region. Diagonal spaceships leave it regularly.
- Reduce Speed to about 15 fps in Settings so you can follow individual ships.
Starting configurations
Loads straight into the simulatorTry any rule
The catalogue covers a few dozen rules. Here you can run any of the 262,144 two-state grid rules, or any of the 256 one-dimensional rules, including ones nobody has written up.
Well-known rules
Where it came from
Named after Stephen Morley, who catalogued its patterns. It is also referred to as "Move", which describes what it does more directly than the name of the person who documented it.
The rule, precisely
What each cell looks at
The 8 cells touching it, including diagonals (the Moore neighbourhood)
What a cell can be
Two states per cell — 0 (dead) and 1 (alive) — on a square grid
The update
next = 1 if (state = 0 and n in {3,6,8}) or (state = 1 and n in {2,4,5}); otherwise 0
B368/S245. Notice that 3 appears in the birth set but not the survival set, so a cell born from three neighbours must immediately find a different amount of support to persist.
Motion as the default
The distinguishing feature is how easily moving structures appear:
- Diagonal spaceships appear routinely in random soup, without being placed deliberately.
- Patterns that emit spaceships repeatedly — guns — also occur naturally here, which is very rare among Life-like rules.
- Settled regions are smaller than in Conway’s rule, because fewer configurations are stable.
- The population curve is noisier than Conway’s, since ships keep leaving and colliding.
Signals are easy, constructions are less studied
Naturally occurring spaceships and guns mean signals are readily available. Less work has gone into assembling them into gates.
Particle-like transport
Morley is a convenient demonstration that a local rule can produce persistent, mobile, particle-like objects without anything in the rule mentioning particles or motion.
Things to try
- Pause and use the Eraser to isolate a single spaceship, then press Play to watch it travel across an empty grid.
- Two spaceships aimed at each other usually produce debris, but occasionally something new. Use Step (.) through the collision.
- Compare with Conway’s rule at the same density to see how much more motion this one produces.