Over the years there must have been countless interesting generalizations of Life. I wonder if there is good concise reference that classifies and groups the main ideas that have been proven "productive", in the sense that they open up non-trivially different and interesting types of dynamic behavior?
A while ago I was toying with the idea of introducing a "macro" stimulus. Basically coupling the local rules of the game to global metrics like how many nodes are alive. This is emulating a bit agent based modeling in economics and in particular the role of regulators raising or lowering rates, alternatively a physical system exposed to higher or lower temperature. But what happens (at least with a simple implementation) is that whatever "stimulus" is introduced tends to overwhelm the known patterns, there seems to be little new "emergent" behavior in the coupled system.
I don't know about "concise", but one place to start for references is the LifeWiki. We've been trying to extend the non-Conway's-Life part of the wiki for a few years now, to cover more of the OCA space ("Other Cellular Automata"):
There's an "Other Cellular Automata" board on conwaylife.com/forums and several channels on the ConwayLife Lounge on Discord -- "#naturalistic", "#circuitry", "#exotic-ca" -- that collect discussions on these kinds of topics.
A while ago I was toying with the idea of introducing a "macro" stimulus. Basically coupling the local rules of the game to global metrics like how many nodes are alive. This is emulating a bit agent based modeling in economics and in particular the role of regulators raising or lowering rates, alternatively a physical system exposed to higher or lower temperature. But what happens (at least with a simple implementation) is that whatever "stimulus" is introduced tends to overwhelm the known patterns, there seems to be little new "emergent" behavior in the coupled system.
https://www.openriskmanagement.com/game_of_life_with_macroec...