- Author
- Nova Spivack
- Published
- 15 October 2025
- Kind
- Personal blog post, with a code repository
- Original
- www.novaspivack.com/science/introducing-lace-a-new-kind-of-cellular-automata
- Subject
- Images made by rules
- Themes
- Rules that generate, Art through code
What it is
Nova Spivack introduces LACE, the Link Automata Computing Engine, written in Python. In ordinary cellular automata, only cells change. In LACE, a cell depends on neighbours and links, and links depend on their cells.
What it says
- Rules can use topology, such as a cell's number of connections and its neighbours' degrees.
- Link influence is adjustable, from purely decorative to strongly conditioning cell states.
- Topology can shape behaviour, and behaviour can shape topology.
- Spivack reports new gliders, oscillators and puffers under these rules.
- An optional mode uses Taichi for GPU-accelerated runs.
What evidence it gives
The evidence is a video gallery and a public code repository. Spivack's claims about new behaviour rest on those demonstrations. The post gives no formal comparison with other rule classes.
Interests and limits
Spivack built the system and describes it enthusiastically, so the language is promotional. The claim that rules could simulate neural networks is stated as theory. This page has not run the code.
Connections
These links are this wiki's own reading, not claims the sources make.
- The components of agent memory. LACE updates links along with the cells they join. Martin's dreaming similarly rewrites wiki pages and repoints their links. What might memory do if links were state rather than navigation?