[dvgrn]

There have been a lot of GoL variants over the years, but I don't remember running into any attempts to vary the speed of evolution in different locations on the same grid.

The idea that all neighbors move to the next tick simultaneously is a fundamental assumption in cellular automata in general. If you try changing that, the optimizations that allow us to simulate CAs at any kind of reasonable speed ... all stop working, pretty much. It's kind of painful even to think about.

Which means there are probably very interesting rules out there somewhere, where CAs run faster/slower depending on pattern density -- it's just going to be very tricky to explore that particular search space.

[hansworst]

Well, there is SmoothLife (e.g. https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1111.1567/#S4) where the time step is also made continuous. I suppose you could extend this so that this isn't some uniform value across the entire space, but instead a value that is constantly recomputed based on neighbourhood density.

[westurner]

The "superstep" that we practically impose upon simulations of entropy and emergence is out of accord with our modern understanding of non-regularly-quantizable spacetime. The debuggable Von Neumann instruction pipeline precludes "in-RAM computing" which conceivably does converge if consensus-level error correction is necessary.

[OscarCunningham]

The term 'superstep' reminds me of the HashLife algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashlife for computing the Game of Life. It computes multiple generations at the same time, and runs at different speeds in different parts of the universe, but only with the purpose of computing CGoL faster, not to introduce any relativity.