MaCE: General Mass Conserving Dynamics for Cellular Automata

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Papadopoulos, Vassilis, Guichard, Etienne
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Papadopoulos, Vassilis
Guichard, Etienne
author_facet Papadopoulos, Vassilis
Guichard, Etienne
contents We present Mass-Conserving Evolution (MaCE), a general method for implementing mass conservation in Cellular Automata (CA). MaCE is a simple evolution rule that can be easily 'attached' to existing CAs to make them mass-conserving, which tends to produce interesting behaviours more often, as patterns can no longer explode or die out. We first show that MaCE is numerically stable and admits a simple continuous limit. We then test MaCE on Lenia, and through several experiments, we demonstrate that it produces a wide variety of interesting behaviours, starting from the variety and abundance of solitons up to hints of intrinsic evolution in resource-constrained environments. Finally, we showcase the versatility of MaCE by applying it to Neural-CAs and discrete CAs, and discuss promising research directions opened up by this scheme.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12306
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MaCE: General Mass Conserving Dynamics for Cellular Automata
Papadopoulos, Vassilis
Guichard, Etienne
Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
We present Mass-Conserving Evolution (MaCE), a general method for implementing mass conservation in Cellular Automata (CA). MaCE is a simple evolution rule that can be easily 'attached' to existing CAs to make them mass-conserving, which tends to produce interesting behaviours more often, as patterns can no longer explode or die out. We first show that MaCE is numerically stable and admits a simple continuous limit. We then test MaCE on Lenia, and through several experiments, we demonstrate that it produces a wide variety of interesting behaviours, starting from the variety and abundance of solitons up to hints of intrinsic evolution in resource-constrained environments. Finally, we showcase the versatility of MaCE by applying it to Neural-CAs and discrete CAs, and discuss promising research directions opened up by this scheme.
title MaCE: General Mass Conserving Dynamics for Cellular Automata
topic Cellular Automata and Lattice Gases
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12306