[HN Gopher] Show HN: Create your own cellular automata
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Show HN: Create your own cellular automata
Author : Aperocky
Score : 60 points
Date : 2021-03-15 14:11 UTC (8 hours ago)
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| derg wrote:
| Cellular Automata are so cool. I did a project for a distributed
| computing course on them and it was real fun throwing different
| rules in and seeing what emerged.
| ninly wrote:
| A couple years ago I threw together some MATLAB functions to take
| a wolfram number and a seed row, along with some cosmetic
| parameters, to generate elementary cellular automata. Nothing
| very big or elaborate, but fun and handy for exploring the ECAs
| themselves.
|
| https://github.com/ninly/ecafun
| mikkom wrote:
| I created something a little more complicated some time ago..
|
| http://kirkas.com/genesys/
|
| Some more information
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/alife/comments/giyjaa/show_ralife_g...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/alife/comments/ger9r4/show_ralife_s...
| Aperocky wrote:
| This is amazing, though I have to say it is also pretty
| confusing.
|
| What does the color represent? Does the creature stack?
| dash2 wrote:
| Question: what proportion of cellular automata generate
| "interesting" patterns in the way Conway's Game of Life does? For
| instance, in the GOL, you can create gliders, which keep their
| pattern over time, and even build logic gates. Perhaps you could
| even have "life forms" in some sense?
|
| Presumably many automata aren't like this and just generate
| uninteresting patterns, or always collapse into some determinate
| after enough time.
|
| What do we know about this?
| Aperocky wrote:
| It doesn't even necessarily need to be dynamic, for instance,
| use this to generate a maze: { "0": [
| "SpontaneousChange 1 0.1" ], "1": [
| "CountAdjacent gt 1 5 2" ], "2": [],
| "colorMap": { "0": "tintblack", "1":
| "cyan", "2": "gray" } }
| mysterydip wrote:
| The wikipedia page actually has a lot of depth on this topic,
| with other rulesets as well (see "specific rules" at the
| bottom): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automaton
| Aperocky wrote:
| Express your own cellular automata without writing 100s of lines
| of boiler plate.
|
| The famous conway game of life can be expressed as:
|
| ``` { "InitialCondition": "1 0.2", "0": [ "CountAdjacent eq 1 3
| 1" ], "1": [ "CountAdjacent lt 1 2 0", "CountAdjacent gt 1 3 0" ]
| } ```
|
| Entirely browser based.
| [deleted]
| SamBam wrote:
| Nice. It's fun the be able to play with the initial "forest fire"
| model and try to model different conditions -- a wet forest which
| takes more adjacent sparks to create a fire, a fire that stays
| burning longer, etc.
|
| A couple small suggestions from someone who makes a lot of these
| kinds of models: A "Step" button would be really nice, to be able
| to advance the model a single step at a time; it would be helpful
| for "Start" to change to "Reset" or "Restart" after the initial
| press, so you're not surprised when it blows away your model;
| "Continue" could be disabled until you Stop, as it doesn't do
| anything.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! The continue was actually a bug as it
| allowed multiple settimeout loops to speed up the process.
|
| Hammered out a fix and added the step button over lunch break,
| pretty easy change & fix (just 10 lines!). thanks for
| suggestion.
| [deleted]
| beforeolives wrote:
| Can anyone share some insight into why cellular automata are a
| big deal? I've built the original Game of Life and some
| variations (in 3D, 4D and on a hexagonal grid) during last year's
| Advent of Code but I still don't get the usefulness or where they
| fit in the larger picture of computer science.
| macintux wrote:
| I've struggled with this question as well, although Wolfram's
| tribute to Solomon Golomb (recently reposted here) helped me
| start to see why they're interesting.
|
| https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/05/solomon-golomb-1...
| yiyus wrote:
| Cellular automata models are widely used in different science
| and engineering disciplines. For example, I use them for the
| simulation of heat treatments of steel.
|
| I guess that the fascination of the CS community comes from: 1)
| Conway; 2) They raise different interesting programming
| questions and exercises (writing GOL is a nice exercise to
| learn a new language, a parallel CA is a nice way to learn
| about parallelization, huge models pose interesting memory
| management questions,...); and 3) They are cool (isn't the
| video about GOL in APL by John Scholes one of the coolest
| programming videos you've ever seen?)
| h2odragon wrote:
| They're useful for making pretty patterns; digital lava lamp
| equivalents. Others mentioned other good reasons; so I'll throw
| that one in for completeness.
| A12-B wrote:
| I'm sure there's a better reason, but I honestly think a major
| factor for why people think this stuff is important is because
| Conway called it 'the game of life', and it was a pretty early
| discovery in computer science. It was basically a recipe for
| sci-fi imagination and headlines, leading some people to
| believe this is literally a program about generating cellular
| life.
| MattConfluence wrote:
| I'd say it's not a very useful model on it's own, but it's a
| great teaching tool that illustrates emergence [1] well. It's
| easy to get started and it gets you into a mindset that you can
| then bring along to other models that you might do something
| slightly more useful with.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
| sequoia wrote:
| Reminds me of this one https://ncase.me/sim/
| thedanbob wrote:
| When I was in college I had a job working for a physics professor
| who was studying cellular computation. The hope was that by
| studying examples in nature of cellular systems that solved
| particular problems (e.g. a leaf trying to maximize sunlight
| absorption while minimizing water loss) we would be able to solve
| similar problems in the artificial realm. Using his equations I
| created a cellular automata simulation in Excel with VBA, my
| first real programming outside of CS classes. Good times.
| Aperocky wrote:
| Now that's dedication, I can't imagine doing the same with
| Excel (though it's definitely possible).
|
| I've never tried this but what does coding in excel feels like?
| Does it feel like an ancient version of scratch?
| nynx wrote:
| Wolfram has produced a number of interesting articles, as well as
| a book, that explore the meta-landscape of cellular automata.
| webmaven wrote:
| More recently, he's been exploring the application of cellular-
| automata-like rules to more general graphs (ie. nodes and
| edges) rather than the classic grids of cells:
| https://www.wolframphysics.org/technical-introduction/
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