ZUSE Automat Agent: Empirical Law Discovery in Elementary Cellular Automata

Version v1.2 adds Section 7.6: a periodic-background oscillator sweep over all256 ECA rules and 15 non-zero periodic backgrounds (1,927,680 runs). Keyfindings: 30 stationary oscillator rules and 36 moving oscillator rules undernon-zero backgrounds, including period-4 oscillators and speed-0.5 gliders notpresent under quiescent zero background. rule_108 persists under all-onebackground with the same motif. The zero-background uniqueness claims from v1.1remain valid and unchanged. We present ZUSE Automat Agent (ZUSE), a deterministic, policy-driven discoveryloop for elementary cellular automata (ECA) that builds an empirical atlas ofcycle laws, world families, and basin fragility without a language model in thediscovery loop. The pipeline combines a fixed seven-law evaluator, adedup-gated observer stack, and persistent multi-seed world records, and isapplied to a 20-world sample spanning ECA rules, Conway's Game of Lifepatterns, and synthetic controls. Every result is reproducible from deterministic scripts with no stochasticcomponents in the discovery loop.