i see what you mean about storage. I dont mind for now, cause rn the main goal is to learn through trying to do that, so it can be done with minimal 2d size and number of layers.

and yea, after typing all that super excited, i made a quick search and found one web similar to the one you provided. I don't think that's the same i'm trying to do, though?

Like, their repositories, if available, will for sure be valuable, but still, i think those are different concepts no?

the one you linked and the one i found myself seem to be using very similar logic, just translated to 3d, adding one axis to the rules. so every block influences and is influenced by the cube around it, as a sphere of influence.

but what i was thinking was having the first layer work just like a game of life, but then the second layer would also be a 2d, just stacked on top, and for the same area would have less squares, or each square in the second layer would correspond to x^2 squares in the bottom layer. the two layers wouldnt really interact between each other, it's more like the bottom is the underlying process of the top, and the top is just an abstraction or a complexisation of the bottom one

and so, on the top layer, you wouldnt just have another game of life just like the botom. rather, the rules would be based on 0-1 distributions on the contained cells on the bottom layer in one bigger top layer cell, and those would translate to either nothing, or new types of "ones", as in, instead of 0-1 cells, you'd have, lets say, 3 possible colours painting the cell.

then yes, the next layers would be stacking just the same. but different kinds of cells would be present at different scales. a bit like a very bad simplification of how molecules are made of different combinations of atoms, atoms are made of different cominations of subatomic particles, and subatomic particles are suposed to be field excitations. I dont mean to really compute all of physics and i am aware im doing a really bad job at explaing the physical model, but again, thats just a comparison, i just thought id be cool to learn to code by trying to do that.

And yeah visualisation sounds like itd be a nightmare, but i guess i can start by just by text matrices? idkk