[seqfan] The sans-collatz automaton

[dann]

Hi seqfans,

I've been exploring an intersection of the Collatz sequence and 2D cellular automata, and I've come across some hints of interesting integer sequences. This is far outside of my domain, so I thought I'd see if anyone here is interested. It's also a little outside the usual seqfan discussion, though, and a bit messy (lots of knobs to tune), so a couple initial questions:

Is this on-topic for the seqfan mailing list?

Does anyone know of existing similar research? I've found papers on representing the Collatz sequence using 1D cellular automata, and parallelizing the calculation of the Collatz map using various CA, but nothing quite like this. 

Here's a graphical example of what I'm playing with: 
http://daimio.org/demos/automata/sans-collatz.html

And some notes on my findings so far:
http://daimio.org/demos/automata/sans-collatz-notes.html

Thanks!

dann