[hqakbxpi] Continuous Cellular Automata

While playing around with Conway's game of life, I got frustrated that gliders only travel in certain orientations (diagonally): in particular the problem that if I fire a gun at a pile a debris, the debris will probably shoot back glider destroying the gun.

But cellular automata is all about playing God, so how about simply designing a universe that does not have this limitation? Then, an interesting series of deductions occurs.

In order for gliders to travel in any direction, we need a continuous universe, not a discrete gridded universe of cells. Then, proceeding naturally based on objects that travel, we make the fundamental objects in our universe point particles. Although it ultimately turns out that there are many things one can do with point particles (to be described later), my initial thought is that point particles can never collide in general position, just always "near miss", so are kind of boring. Which leads to the other formulation of the universe: everything is waves. Interestingly, this is the same wave particle duality of our actual universe.

Waves interact: superpositions of waves generate other waves.

Simulating waves everywhere requires a great amount more computational power than point particles floating around; we need to simulate every point in space: maybe some sort of finite element calcuation. Much like the countless hours wasted on Conway's game of life in the early days of digital computing, we might someday see countless hours spent on quantum computers precisely for this game of playing God in a quantum simulation universe.

Back to particles: particles emit a field depending on their state; particles' state may change depending on what fields they feel, as well as affect their velocity.