﻿1D Cellular Automata Simulator (c) 2012 Aaron Vose and Paul Giblock


The following section described in some detail the behavior of some
the control buttons on the right hand side of the graphical user
interface window: “Quit”, “Random CA”, “Restart”, “Continue”,
“Decimate”, “Save EPS”, “Class I”, “Class II”, “Class III”, “Class
IV”.



Quit 

This button will cause the application to terminate.  The way this is
handled is rather abrupt, so expect an instant and not so clean
shutdown (to the user it should look the same: the application has
ended).


Random CA 

Clicking this button will create a new random rule table
for the cellular automaton.  Note that the size of the new rule table
that is randomly generated will be the same size as the old table.  To
change the table size, try adjusting the command line arguments for
radius “-r” and for states per cell “-K”.  This button will also
restart the simulation at the beginning and create a new random
starting cell space.


Restart 

This button causes the simulation to restart from the beginning (time
= 0), but also will reinitialize the starting cell state to be
uniformly random.  Note that this button leaves the rule table
untouched.


Continue

This button toggles the run state from either (1) run until the end of
the screen is reached and (2) run forever.  When the button is toggled
to state 2, new generations will appear at the bottom of the display
while the older generations will scroll up the window.


Decimate 

Clicking on this button will randomly pick a non-zero rule in the
current cellular automaton rule table and change it to 0.  After the
rule table is adjusted as described above, the simulation is restarted
on a new randomly generated initial cell space.


Save EPS 

This button will write the current view of the cellular automaton and
its current on-screen history to an encapsulated postscript (EPS)
file.  This file serves as a kind of screen-shot so that one could
include the image in a paper or presentation.  These EPS output images
are vector images and so have an essentially infinite resolution.  The
best part is that these images can also be read back into the
simulator as a kind of saved state file.  Thus, if one exports an EPS,
one can then resume the exact same CA from the exact same state it was
saved in by loading the saved EPS image with the “-f” command line
argument.


Class I -- Class II -- Class III -- Class IV

These buttons refer to the classifications described by Chris Langton
(at least I think it was him, perhaps is was Wolfram).  The idea is
that the CA being simulated may reach a constant limit (e.g. die) and
thus be a Class I.  Or, the CA could enter a small simple cycle or
loop and thus be a Class II.  Our software will detect when a CA has
entered a state that means it will be a Class I or Class II.  If this
is detected, the buttons will change color to red to show you what
classification the CA as simulated is currently in.  In addition to
these buttons changing color to tell you what class a CA is, if you
click on a button, the current CA rule table, lambda, lambda_t,
entropy, the classification you clicked, and other stats will be
written to standard out (the console).  In this way, one can play
around with the GUI and then generate a nice log of stats to further
analyze and research.

