Tutorials/General technology
So now, after coming across a good cellular automata, you have decided to do something with it — something more significant than random soup searching and more engaging than automatic software searching. Then you begin to consider signal circuitry, the very connection between microscopic evolution and macroscopic construction.
What is a signal?
A signal is a moving configuration different from its background. In terms of cellular automata, the following patterns can carry signals:
- Spaceships in an empty medium,
- Fuses, drifters and negative spaceships in some nonempty media, and
- Methuselahs and other active reactions in conduits.
A signal travels through the space at a certain speed, which is an important measure since timing (especially synchronization) decides whether signal circuitry works or not.
What do signals do?
Signals transform and interact in various ways. A lone signal can be created, reflected and/or flipped, multiplicated, transformed into other signal(s), or destroyed. Two or more signals react to annihilate or to perform logic operations.
Signals transform and interact in some special conditions. (incomplete)
How to find these conditions?
Constructing these building blocks in signal circuitry is quite non-trivial.