Through Cells

There is a universe to explore and map, and you are a cartographer!

Note: This is a development build

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The game is an indie-research project, attempting to explore cellular automata worlds in a citizen science manner.

For this purpose, the game submits successful game solutions to a server. The solutions are then instantly publicly available and analyzable.

The game is open-source, MIT-licensed and available on GitHub: https://github.com/ndry/digdeeper3. The game is in active development.

# The research

> The goal of the research is to find elementary cellular automata with emergent behavior.

Elementary emergent system is a system with very few rules but still an ability to exhibit complex behavior. Like in Wolfram's class 4 behavior of simple computational models, defined as "...neither completely stable nor completely chaotic.
Localized structures appear and interact in complex ways."

Elementary cellular automata are a good example of elementary systems. Obviously, not all elementary systems are emergent -- very few are.

The hypothesis is that the emergent systems are fun to explore, and vice versa -- the fun systems are emergent.

So, let a system manifest an explorable world. If someone among all possible worlds finds a fun world, and the game broadcasts it to others, and endorses others to compete in exploring it, then the most interesting worlds will bubble up -- and those would be derived from the emergent systems.

The game is an attempt to do just that.

# The lore and the glossary

There is a universe to explore and map, and the player is a cartographer.

The universe consists of `Worlds` defined mainly by `Cellular Automata`.

Not all `Worlds` are fun to explore, so collectively the cartographers are looking for the ones that are.

The `Basecamp` is a common space for the players to share their findings.

The `Dropzone` defines a point in the `World` - the parameters to generate the specific instance of the `Cellular Automaton` (mainly, the seed).

The `Trek` is a player-made path through the `World`.

The `Drop` describes the player and the `Dropzone`. The `Drop` is a single play attempt.

The `Sight` is a computed state, all the data available to the player at a given step of the `Trek`.

Generally, the way `Sight` is computed defines how the player plays.

The `Copilot` is a non-player companion, kind of AI to automate the mundane routes and help the player to explore the `World`.