Collision-based logic in Lenia and its composition boundary

Abstract

Continuous cellular automata such as Lenia spontaneously produce lifelike, self-propelling patterns, including the Orbium glider, which travels in a straight line while pulsing through a fixed breathing cycle. Collision-based logic, where moving patterns compute by colliding, is established in discrete cellular automata and continuous physical media. Within continuous cellular automata, computation has so far been trained into the rule rather than emerging from collisions, and whether a fixed-rule automaton like Lenia can support general collision-based computation remains open. This paper constructs an INHIBIT gate from collisions of the Orbium glider. Of the patterns searched across four continuous-CA rule types, the Orbium glider is the only one shown to survive a collision with both copies intact. A control glider deflects a signal glider off its output line, so the output carries a signal only when no control is present. The gate blocks across all twenty-four phases of the breathing cycle and nine integer offsets of the control. Two such gates in series, with one signal line and two controls, compose into an AND-NOT chain, correct on all eight input combinations. By contrast, routing a signal beyond that single chain is undemonstrated. A deflected signal is not restored to a fixed landing position, and no reusable absorber for the surviving gliders was found. The immediate open question for collision-based computation in Lenia therefore narrows from whether a gate exists to whether a deflected signal can be delivered to a downstream gate, the next requirement for composing the gate beyond a single straight chain.