Shared Fever

What to explore

Make infection, rigid collective motion, and mandatory vulnerability visible. Individual compasses should combine into body headings, with exact cancellation resting honestly. Preserve Conway defaults even if long runs settle.

Rules, update order and replay

Square Moore lattice, 80/120/160 square; diagonal contact counts. Toroidal default, optional bounded edges. Living organisms own heading (0 NW, 1 N, 2 NE, 3 E, 4 SE, 5 S, 6 SW, 7 W), permanent rotation sense, private turn counter, infection turns remaining, and break turns remaining. Grid positions own independent seeded birth streams. Generation and previous-Step causal evidence are part of complete state.

Freeze occupancy and state. Eligible living cells have no break. Any eligible living cell with at least the threshold number of living neighbors initiates infection; all living neighbors count, including recovering ones. An existing infection also seeds spread. Flood through the complete connected eligible component immediately, before Life. Recovering cells cannot initiate, receive, or relay infection. Existing clocks never refresh; newly infected cells receive the configured duration. This explicitly uses whole-component knowledge, unlike GOL-008's one-ring-per-turn propagation. Component IDs are temporary grouping indices only and never choose winners or persist as organism identity.

Sum equal-length compass vectors across each infected body. Choose the nearest of eight directions; zero or exactly tied result rests. Integer directional histograms and exact arithmetic in Q(sqrt(2)) resolve ties without floating-point or traversal-order priority. Every member proposes one identical one-cell shift. Its own body's old positions may be occupied; any other frozen living occupant blocks the complete move, even if about to die/move. Bounded edges block the whole body. Among geometrically possible proposals, any shared destination rejects all claiming bodies, with no retry, swaps, partial movement, or priority. Blocked and resting bodies remain protected and their clocks advance normally.

Uninfected/recovering cells apply B/S at frozen counts. Accepted arrivals supersede births. Frozen living departed sites receive no birth this turn. Newborns start uninfected and first act next Step. Commit together, then surviving organisms advance their compass clocks; the heading before the turn is used for voting. Infection acquired on turn 10 with duration 3 protects turns 10,11,12; turn 13 is the one-turn break, and a survivor is eligible again on 14. Density loss never shortens infection; density/contact never extends it. Clocks are individual, so later recruits can outlast older members. Bodies merge/split by current eligible contact on the next Step. Break applies ordinary Life immediately; there is no GOL-019 isolation exception. Death clears organism state; rebirth assigns fresh compass/sense from the position's stream, with no inherited infection or break.

Reset rebuilds selected occupancy and every hidden layer from separate world and compass seeds. Painting consumes a fresh local birth assignment; erasing clears organism state and editing clears transient evidence. Compass cadence edits pause and restart turn counters, retaining headings/field/infection. Other rule edits pause and affect future actions; ongoing infection retains remaining time. Break length is sampled on infection expiration. Applying presets uses these same rules.

Reading the simulation

Canvas 2D; lime ordinary life, cyan infected, amber mandatory break, cream births, with pale arrival outlines and coral blocked outlines. Simplified Color retains binary occupancy while written inspection preserves the evidence. Select a cell to outline its entire proposed body and targets and inspect neighbor count, infection source, lifetime/break, body size, eight heading votes, resultant, blocked reason, organism fate and exact next site. Compasses are private even when members temporarily share a displacement. Mobile randomize/reset/play sits after the stage guides and keeps the rail action.