Life is great, because it's so easy to explain and understand. And it has a story, a metaphor that connects it with humanity, that makes it more interesting and relatable to more people than the pure beautiful mathematics are.
So if John Conway's Life gets you interested in cellular automata, then continue on to the After-Life!
As cellular automata go, Life is just another counting rule (depending just on the count of its neighbors, not their position), which themselves are a very limited subset of all possibilities.
You can make up your own rules, and combine rules together in different ways, and it helps to understand how other rules work, and whether they were "designed" or "discovered".
There are many more wildly different, interesting, and beautiful rules, many even with their own stories and metaphors that help understand them, like how the spirals of BZ reactions are like two-way chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms:
>You also get beautiful spirals from Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions. They can be simulated by cellular automata, and are manifested in nature by chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms!
>I don't think they're Turing complete or self replicating per se, but you can start them on a random configuration, and they will form several spiraling "attractors" around oscillating cores ("nucleation"), that send out concentric spiraling waves, which meet waves from other attractors (or boundaries in the environment like a maze) and reinforce or cancel each other out, and also they can solve mazes and climb gradients and find food! (Plus, slime molds are not only beautiful, but make great pets, and they're easy to care for!)
So if John Conway's Life gets you interested in cellular automata, then continue on to the After-Life!
As cellular automata go, Life is just another counting rule (depending just on the count of its neighbors, not their position), which themselves are a very limited subset of all possibilities.
You can make up your own rules, and combine rules together in different ways, and it helps to understand how other rules work, and whether they were "designed" or "discovered".
There are many more wildly different, interesting, and beautiful rules, many even with their own stories and metaphors that help understand them, like how the spirals of BZ reactions are like two-way chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms:
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#Zhabo
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916
>You also get beautiful spirals from Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions. They can be simulated by cellular automata, and are manifested in nature by chemical reactions, slime molds, and reefs of tube worms!
>I don't think they're Turing complete or self replicating per se, but you can start them on a random configuration, and they will form several spiraling "attractors" around oscillating cores ("nucleation"), that send out concentric spiraling waves, which meet waves from other attractors (or boundaries in the environment like a maze) and reinforce or cancel each other out, and also they can solve mazes and climb gradients and find food! (Plus, slime molds are not only beautiful, but make great pets, and they're easy to care for!)
[more at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22737916 ]