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.
Details
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).
See also
*
Langton's loops
Langton's loops are a particular "species" of artificial life in a cellular automaton created in 1984 by Christopher Langton. They consist of a loop of cells containing genetic information, which flows continuously around the loop and out along a ...
*
Chou-Reggia loop
References
Further reading
*
*
External links
visual representationof 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