[cochleari_major]

I find the following asymmetry interesting: if you pick a random spot and start zooming out, you will pass through interiors of both dead and living cells in some ratio. But if you start zooming in, pretty much all of the cells you pass through will be dead.

[tschumacher]

Yes, this is inconsistent. When you zoom in 10 levels and then zoom out 10 levels again, pretty much all cells you see will be dead. But if you continue to zoom out further than 10 levels, you will see some mix of live and dead cells again.

Zooming in is easily defined: when you zoom into an on-state OTCA metapixel, you can check which pixels that make up the metapixel are on and which are off [1]. Same deal for zooming into an off-state OTCA metapixel. The reason you are seeing mostly dead pixels is that most pixels inside an OTCA metapixel are off, so the chance of hitting a pixel that is on is slim.

Zooming out is more tricky: when zooming out of an on-state pixel, that pixel could be at many possible positions inside an on-state or off-state OTCA metapixel. In their blog post the author says that they randomly select from the possible options in a way that adds "diversity" [2]. I think this could be improved to align with the statistics of zooming in.

[1]: https://conwaylife.com/wiki/OTCA_metapixel [2]: https://blog.oimo.io/2023/04/10/life-universe-en/#fnref5

[SamBam]

Except that even in dead space when you zoom in you find the borders of all cells, and each of those borders is just as alive as any other live cell. I kept feel like, if I zoomed in to either an always-on cell or an always-off cell I would enter into something noticeably more static, but actually each one was just as alive as any of the universe around it.

[andoando]

Yeah I found the same thing, does anyone have an explanation for that?