The Byl's loop is an artificial lifeform similar in concept to Langton's loop. It is a two-dimensional, 5-neighbor cellular automaton with 6 states per cell, and was developed in 1989 by John Byl, from the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Trinity Western University.

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The Byl's loop was developed just a few years after Langton's simplification of

Codd's automaton Codd's cellular automaton is a cellular automaton (CA) devised by the British computer scientist Edgar F. Codd in 1968. It was designed to recreate the computation- and construction-universality of von Neumann's CA but with fewer states: 8 ins ...

, which produced a simpler automaton that would reproduce itself in 151 time-steps. John Byl simplified Langton's automaton further, with an even smaller automaton that reproduced in just 25 time-steps. Byl's automaton consisted of an array of 12 chips — of which 4 or 5 could be counted as the instruction tape — and 43 transition rules, while Langton's device consisted of some 10×15 chips, including an instruction tape of 33 chips, plus some 190 transition rules. Essentially, the simplification consisted in using fewer cellular states (6 as compared with Langton's 8) and a smaller replicating loop (12 cells as compared with Langton's 86).

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visual representation
of the Byl's loop in a Java applet
Cellular Automata FAQ - Applications
(section "What are Byl's rules for a self reproducing CA?") for the full rule set of Byl's loop * {{citation , url = http://lslwww.epfl.ch/pages/embryonics/thesis/Chapter3.html , chapter = Chapter 3: Self-Replication , author = Gianluca Tempesti , title = A Self-Repairing Multiplexer-Based FPGA Inspired by Biological Processes , year=1998 Artificial life Cellular automaton rules

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