Replicators in Game-of-Life-like automata

Game of Life is a two-state cellular automaton capable of displaying high complexity starting from simple rules. Taking inspiration from Game of Life, we introduce a new class of Cellular Automata with two types of alive states and one dead state. This broad class of cellular automata allows for more interesting behaviors, including replicators at relatively small scales. We develop an algorithm to search for rules that open for small-scale structures that exhibit self-replication. We also find replicators that emerge spontaneously from random initial conditions. We find several such rules, including some that even exhibit scale-free replication. This class of replicators, with repeated copying within growing structures, inspires origin-of-life discussions using diverse and cooperating building blocks.