CA Constraint Lab

Interactive cellular automata visualization for testing the message-passing invariant.

Quick Start

open ~/working/wanderland/experiments/ca-playground/index.html

Or serve it:

cd ~/working/wanderland/experiments/ca-playground && python -m http.server 8888
# Then open http://localhost:8888

Features

Rule Selection

Test different constraint-breaking scenarios:

Rule	Constraint	What It Tests
Game of Life	Baseline	Standard GoL
Break Conservation	2a	Random cell flips (5%)
Break Memory	2b	State ignores self, only neighbors
Break Hierarchy	2c	Random threshold per cell per step
Enhance Prediction	2d+	Momentum (30% flip probability)
Overprediction	2d-	Anticipate future neighbor states

Environment Noise

Slider to add stochasticity to neighbor perception. Tests the refined hypothesis:

• Deterministic (0% noise): Overprediction helps
• Stochastic (>X% noise): Overprediction hurts (hallucination)
• Phase transition at critical noise level

Noise Sweep Experiment

Automated experiment that:

• Runs GoL and Overprediction at 10 noise levels (0-30%)
• Measures temporal variance after 200 steps
• Identifies the crossover point (if any)
• Exports results as JSON

Metrics

• Step: Current iteration
• Alive Cells: Population count
• Density: Alive/Total
• Temporal Variance: Instability over last 50 steps

Recording

• Record runs to capture step-by-step data
• Export as JSON for analysis
• Attach to Oculus cases

The Hypothesis

The original framework predicted "overprediction → oscillation/hallucination". But the CA test showed overprediction HELPING in deterministic environments.

Refined hypothesis: Prediction overshoot is only pathological when there's a mismatch between prediction model and environment stochasticity.

Environment	Prediction Effect
Deterministic	Helps (accurate lookahead)
Stochastic	Hurts (fitting noise)
Adversarial	Exploited

Case

Part of: [[case:task-54c00d7b-9129-4db2-87a3-8b758f65fb4e|The Case of the Constraint-Breaking Automata]]

Source

• /Users/graemefawcett/working/wanderland/experiments/ca-playground/index.html
• /Users/graemefawcett/working/wanderland/experiments/ca_constraint_breaking.py (original CLI version)

Provenance

• Created: 2026-01-06
• Context: Testing message-passing invariant falsifiability
• Status: 🟢 Active tool

North

slots:
- context:
  - CA lab is an implementation of the experiments documented in falsifiable-experiments
  slug: falsifiable-experiments-message-passing