Cellular Automaton № 1 · Demographic Class
Conway's cells are timeless — a live cell is identical to every other live cell, forever. Here, every cell carries a private clock. It is born juvenile, must reach maturity before it can help create new life, and eventually dies of old age. Crowding doesn't kill; time does. Watch generations move across the grid as colored cohorts — booms, die-offs, and traveling waves of age that no binary rule can produce.
Standard "Life-like" automata encode their whole rule in two numbers (Conway is
B3/S23): a dead cell's fate and a live cell's fate, both decided purely by a
neighbor count. Every cell is in one of two states, so the only thing that can travel across the
grid is a spatial pattern — a glider, a spaceship.
Lifespan adds an orthogonal axis: an integer age per cell, with two thresholds. A cell only
counts as a parent once age ≥ M, and it dies when age > L
regardless of its neighbors. Because young colonies are infertile, the system self-paces:
a dense cluster can't explode until it grows up, then reproduces in synchrony, then dies in
synchrony — producing demographic waves and age-gradients (visible as the color ramp) rather than
still-lifes. The emergent objects here are cohorts, not shapes. Tune M and
L apart and you get rolling generational pulses; bring them together and the world
flickers between boom and extinction.