Wandering Memory

What to explore

Make identity persist through travel, death and revival. Let exact shared life-history patterns and repeated segments switch entities between inertial movement and settled Life. Movement need not locate better community: direction is internal, not a global search. No sustained-life or flocking outcome is promised.

Rules, update order and replay

Square 80/120/160 grid, toroidal by default, optional bounded edges. A location is vacant or holds one entity, alive or dead. Only living Moore neighbors count. Every entity owns an ID (inspection only), life, mode, compass, seeded permanent rotation sense, compass clock, travel heading, one eight-bit alive/dead history register and valid history length, plus a 64-bit repetition register, valid length and one-shot match latch. Mobility and settlement codes belong to the shared rule configuration, not to individual entities. Each location owns a seeded compass birth stream, which stays there. Initial compasses use seeded random headings among all eight directions; initial mode is settled and no completed history is invented. Empty locations have no entity memory.

Each Step freezes the old world. On an entity's first update only, the community minimum chooses its starting mode. Thereafter exact suffix matches against its completed alive/dead history choose mobile or settled; neither or both matching retains the existing mode unless a fresh repetition match overrides it. A match requires the full configured length (2–8), including leading zeroes. Every entity compares against the same two codes in the rule configuration. Each code has its own length of 2–8 digits and is directly editable with binary buttons. Defaults are mobility 1110 and settlement 1111, both four digits: recent death can release a settled entity, while repeated life can stop a traveler. Shortening a code drops its oldest digits; lengthening prepends zeroes. Pattern edits preserve the board and entity histories, pause playback and invalidate previous evidence. Mode history is not recorded. Mobile entities preserve life, so mixed settlement codes can leave them traveling indefinitely after old mixed history rolls away. No hidden Life update is added to prevent that outcome.

Settled entities apply B3/S23 to frozen living Moore counts at their current location. Death preserves the entity; birth revives it without replacing identity. Mobile entities preserve life/death and capture their current compass on entry. Existing mobile entities retain heading even through blocks. Every Step, propose one adjacent location in that heading. Movement cadence is fixed at one. Frozen occupied locations (alive or dead, staying or departing) block; off-field bounded moves block. Multiple claims on an empty destination all fail. No retries, swaps, follow-through, arbitrary winners or evolution randomness. Crossing paths are allowed. A unique arrival has priority over a proposed birth there.

Vacant locations at or above the community minimum use the birth mask. Successful birth creates a fresh settled entity with seeded random heading and sense; departed origins remain vacant this Step. Arrivals are not retested until the next Step. All actions commit simultaneously. Existing entities tick their compass after acting, in either mode; interval zero freezes it, otherwise rotate one eighth-turn at that many private Steps. A new birth has timer zero and one completed alive record. Every retained entity appends its resulting alive/dead state, keeping eight records for exact codes and 64 records for repetition. Travel carries every entity field and last action explanation. The compass never steers an existing mobile run.

Reset recreates the selected opening, all entities, streams and hidden state. Clear removes all entities and restarts streams. Paint Alive or Dead entity changes life at an existing entity without erasing its memory; painting a vacancy creates fresh identity. Erase removes identity. All edits pause; rule/topology/paint edits invalidate prior evidence. Changing compass cadence resets clocks only. Pattern and length edits preserve the field and recorded histories. Generation and remaining entity memory persist under edits. Full replay includes every entity array, site stream, next ID, generation, evidence, dimensions, topology and rules.

Repetition adds a shared optional override: choose segment width X (1–8 bits) and threshold Y (1–7 copies). The most recent X-bit block must occur in Y+1 consecutive, non-overlapping blocks ending at the newest completed record. Any binary segment qualifies; it need not equal either authored code. Equality at Y copies does not fire. Each entity retains a separate 64-bit rolling register and valid length for this detector, while the original eight-bit history remains the source for the two exact codes. No mode history or periodic timer is introduced.

A newly satisfied repetition condition flips the committed mode, taking priority over both exact-code triggers for that Step. A per-entity latch suppresses another repetition flip until a completed-history comparison fails; the regular exact codes remain active on intervening Steps. Changing X, Y or enablement rearms this latch without erasing histories. All repetition state travels with identity, including through death/revival and blocked movement. Reset/Clear/new entities start with empty repetition history and an unlatched detector; vacancy births start with one alive record. Defaults enable X=2, Y=3 (four copies/eight records). Version-five presets include these settings; older complete records adapt with repetition disabled to preserve their former behavior.

Reading the simulation

Canvas 2D: filled living entities; cyan mobile and lime settled life. Dead entities are invisible by default. The independent Show dead entities checkbox reveals hollow blue mobile dead and gray settled dead marks in Color view. Toggling it changes no engine state. Color off shows living occupancy only and preserves the reveal preference; inspection always retains written evidence. Paused inspection reveals identity, alive/dead history oldest-to-newest, both headings, sense/timer, living count, both shared binary patterns with warmup/match status, next mode and its reason, repetition segment/copy count/grouped history/latch, proposed destination, claims, exact block or move result, next entity fate and next site occupancy. Previous action travels with identity; site outcomes are labeled separately. Arrow keys select, Enter paints, P plays/pauses, S steps. Randomizers stay in their own rail section, per the collection's convention.