Many years ago I was interested in cellular automata, inspired by Stephen Wolfram's work. I dug into elementary CA and totalistic 3-state rules. But when I went to more states it was getting boring. Almost all of them are dead or chaotic or something that everybody has already seen. But somewhere inside there could be another 110, and nobody looked.

Now that we have AI coding, I decided I can build something in that area, and an app for scanning rules was the obvious thing. I implemented an explorer with a bunch of filters: gliders, chaos, large structures, and custom search. The last one works backwards — you draw a pattern and a rule passes only if this pattern never occurs. I could not define "interesting", but it was easy to say what disqualifies a rule. It also renders diagrams as big PNG.

Demo: https://kypaku.github.io/pages/ca2026/ Source: https://github.com/Kypaku/ca2026