Searching for Glider Guns in Cellular Automata: Exploring Evolutionary and Other Techniques

We aim to construct an automatic system for the discovery of collision-based universal cellular automata that simulate Turing machines in their space-time dynamics using gliders and glider guns. In this paper, an evolutionary search for glider guns with different parameters is described and other search techniques are also presented as benchmark. We demonstrate the sponstaneous emergence of an important number of novel glider guns discovered by genetic algorithms.