Alexander 'Sasha' Chislenko writes:
> Does anybody know of any implementations of the game of Life
> that introduce mutations, diseases, noise, colored cells, etc.?
Mutations and noise, that seems to be indistinguishable. Can't parse diseases. Colored cells seem to mean states richer than boolean.
Such things have indeed been investigated, albeit not under the label 'Life'. You might want peruse the cellular automata bibliography on Santa Fe's ALife server. The literature is quite huge, though somewhat difficult to obtain.
> It seems that with a few additional rules one can
> develop evolving / fault-tolerant cellular automata,
> and do lots of other interesting things, such as researching
> attractors in automata state space and preparing for
Searches though state and rule space are not exactly unprecendented, albeit the scope has been very limited. This is a question of hardware, and time effort. The code is simply enough to write.
> nanotechnology that would produce physical automata
> subjected to noise.
Using cellular automata implemented in hardware for computation purposes have been suggested for more than a decade, by many people ('gene included). The concept keeps popping up frequent enough, but still not enough for the mainstream to perceive it.
> But maybe, these things have already been done?
>
> If not, is anybody interested in collaboration?
Yes, but give me a couple of months.
'gene