Mutual Aid

What to explore

Make ordinary Life recognizable while exposing support and drain as exact local causes. Preserve the literal unanimity defaults even if they make support rare. Do not tune the rules merely to force sustained activity.

Rules, update order and replay

Binary square lattice, 80/120/160 square; toroidal by default, bounded exterior always dead. First compute every cell's B3/S23 proposal from the frozen board. Then count those proposals among the same eight Moore neighbors, excluding self. At or above support minimum (default 8), grant life. At or below drain maximum (default 0), force death. Between thresholds, retain the ordinary proposal. Drain maximum is strictly below support minimum, so the clauses cannot conflict. By default both clauses apply to current dead and living sites; each family has independent birth and survival switches that gate by the cell's current state. Disabling both switches disables that family without losing its threshold. ordinary projected births count as future living colleagues. No recursive support, cascade, RNG or scan priority occurs during evolution. Each neighbor's proposal consults its own Moore neighborhood, giving the focal decision a fixed radius-two dependency.

One Step commits all results together. Occupancy alone determines the future; previous occupancy, ordinary proposal, current/projected neighbor counts and outcome arrays retain causal evidence, with a validity flag and generation. Full replay includes these arrays, rules, dimensions and topology. Reset rebuilds the chosen seeded/composed opening and clears evidence and generation. Clear empties it. Painting, topology and rule edits pause, preserve generation and clear evidence; seed/density edits take effect on Reset. Rule edits retain life.

Reading the simulation

Canvas 2D: lime established life, cream ordinary births, coral ordinary deaths, cyan support overrides, amber drain overrides. Dead event colors are evidence of the preceding Step; Color off is binary occupancy. Paused inspection reports current occupancy/count, ordinary result, forecast count, matching clause, exact next result and previous Step evidence. Cyan/gray outlines show first-ring forecasts; violet dashes show the outer inputs. Written labels preserve meaning without color. Arrow keys select; Enter paints; P plays/pauses; S steps.