Hey I am following up to an earlier note to the Community, asking for examples of Ruliology. This is another related note/update, and an invitation to contribute to a significant Community resource.

Within the Wolfram Community, the "Wolfram Atlas of Simple Programs" Atlas has a great outline and some well-structured CA-related content, but it's incomplete and also a bit dated at this point. However, we can use this as a basis for some Ruliology resources: pages for each of the 256 elementary Cellular Automata, entered on the Wolfram wiki, hosted by the Wolfram Institute.

Here is a "template notebook" that automatically generates a notebook for any given elementary CA rule (numbers 0-255). I welcome feedback about this document. IF THESE WERE USED AS THE BASIS OF wiki pages for each elementary Rule:

• What is missing from these summaries?
• Are there alternatives/additional types of visualizations you'd like to see?
• Would you like to see the discussion areas as separate sections aggregated below all visualizations, or just below each visualization?
• ANY OTHER FEEDBACK is so welcome.

That said, there is no need to spend a ton of time ruminating text editing, unless you are particularly and ardently inclined to do so at this stage. The reason that you can wait, is that, once these are posted on the wiki, you will have a chance to edit them voraciously and with wikiworld attribution.

This code is a "template" that I intended for you to download to your desktop, and then run. There is an "instructions" box that appears at the bottom. You can follow those instructions. You might also note that my coding isn't the most beautiful or slick, but look: i have been dying to have this and there was nothing like this out there and so i just went and made it. so there.

If you've read this far, and you are interested in Ruliology, there are more ways you can contribute to the conversation. Look up Ruliology in Community posts and check out those posts. Reply/leave comments. If you see other community posts that you think might be canonic examples of good Ruliology, "reply to" them to mention Ruliology so that we can find them, and use them to enhance our wiki and any other developing Community assets.

Many thanks!
-Elly

Yeah, thanks for asking. I would like to analyze a sampling of notebooks, community posts, etc that (might?) represent Ruliology. I, too, can also look for a few existing examples, post links here, and provide commentary. That will take me a bit of time and I'd like to focus on it appropriately.

But in the mean time, I do want to respond to your comment about the definition of Ruliology. This conversation is actually aiming to further define Ruliology. Ruliology is incredibly general in some dimensions. Defining it as "anything rule-based" is maybe true, but too general. There are other dimensions in which more variance is possible, such as the nature of the computational approach used, or the dynamics of the system being explored.

Stephen Wolfram has elaborated on Ruliology in a few ways, especially recently. I am going to gather a list. At least once he mentions "the study of simple computational rules". But there is a lot left unanswered, and I want to help explore that further. What is Ruliology's identity as a discipline? At its core, does Ruliology propose a disciplined approach or method? Does Ruliology have a clear definition of what constitutes a "study"? Does Ruliology identify as a science? Does Ruliology refer to its scope of study as "the space of all possible computational rules" - the "rulial space", or the "Ruliad"?

I'm looking for questions like that... I'm seeking a range of thoughts related to Ruliology. And a range of examples will help us as well.

I am also thinking of Stephen Wolfram's recent post about avocational science. Recent post Is he entertaining the idea that Ruliology might be "avocational" by definition? Is he suggesting that it might not be a vocation per se, but more akin to a passionate pursuit? Such as, a practice in the style of the pre-1830s explorer/naturists who were often gentlemen-scientists, or Ada Lovelace herself... but with a much more accessible landscape, and more democratic access to tools. Or maybe that's going too far. I want to "think out of the box" as they say (but not too much lol).

OK, so that might not be clarification. But I hope it helps people here to come up with: - examples of "good Ruliology" (or suggestions of criteria for evaluating what is "good") - ideas to define Ruliology as if it were a discipline - general musings on Ruliology, in support of advancing our collective understanding of the pursuit. Thank you!!