Aesthetic considerations

The Rainbow Life Game allows some rather unexpected aesthetic experiences. General advice on how to achieve beautiful patterns is not easy to give since these things are basicly subjective, but a starting suggestion could be: Choose an initial pattern similar to one of the patterns here to the right. At least people in the knitting or glazed tiling business should get some inspiration here.

Assimilation and segregation.

One of the first observations to make when trying out the Rainbow Life Game is that the degree of assimilation, i.e. mixing of the colours, in general seems to depend on the initial pattern. As a rule a well-mixed initial pattern, e.g. with regularly alternating colours, will quickly blend into different gray shades.(I will from now on suppose that the initial colours are black and white.)

In contrast, a 'segregated' initial pattern with two differently coloured unconnected components most often will remain segregated. (I will make it perfectly clear here that I have no racial or other similar concealed interests in these studies). A typical life story that starts from such a segragated situation is that the two factions clash and get some gray offspring which soon afterwards perish, often due to choking, after which the white and black parties continue their growth at some distance from each other. These events may then be repeated a number of times.

The development that follows from the initial pattern to the right conforms well with the above scenario. A grayish middle part appears immediately but vanishes already in generation 5. After that the white and black parties develop independently (in fact, of the five surviving 'white' cells in generation 5 actually four contain some barely visible black genes.) Finally the 'black' and 'white' factions form three stable blinkers each, which prevents any further gene interchange.

The mentioned segregating tendency is however apparently reduced if the initial patterns become larger. In those cases there often appear gray factions and even dark gray and light gray groups that seem to fight each other. This latter scenario develops from the pattern to the right here in spite of its relatively small size.