Anders Pearson 1.3 2003-05-13 anders converted the code to Numeric. lots of changes. 1.2 2003-01-22 anders updated to include improvements 1.1 2002-11-26 anders started writing The Cellular Automata Toy (CAT) is a very basic framework for experimenting with and prototyping 2 dimensional Cellular Automata models. It provides a graphical display of the CA in the form of a grid, an interface to manipulate the state and step through computations and handles the connections between cells (providing each cell with a list of the values in its neighboring cells). It just leaves the actual specification of transition rules to the user in the form of a textbox that they can enter small bits of python code into. It is intended only for experimentation, exploration, and demonstration of CA concepts. It is not intended to be high performance. grab the latest version: cat.zip. you must have python 2.2.2 installed on your system to run the program. If python didn't come with it, you will also need the Tkinter library. Python's Numeric and Imaging libraries are also required. unzip the cat.zip file. it should contain the file cat.py. run cat by typing 'python cat.py' at a command prompt (and from within the folder that cat.py is in). you should see a window like: each cell has 8 bits of state (ie, 256 different possible states). CAT displays the state of each cell on the grid by mapping it to a shade of gray with 0 = black and 255 = white. when CAT is started, it sets each cell on the grid to a random value. clicking the 'clear' button will set bits of all cells on the grid to 0 (they will display as black). clicking the 'random' button will set all bits of all cells on the grid to random values between 0 and 255. clicking the 'boolean' button will force all the bits of each individual cell to the value of the most significant bit for that cell. in other words, it removes the grayscale and rounds each cell up to 255 (white) or down to 0 (black). right now, clicking the 'step' button should have no noticable effect. clicking on any cell on the grid at any time will toggle the value of each bit of that cell. what that essentially does is subtract the current value of the cell from 255. so if the cell is black (a value of zero), clicking on it will set it to 255 - 0 = 255 (white). if the cell is white (a value of 255), clicking on it will set it to 255 - 255 = 0 (black). to actually do anything useful with CAT, you must enter some python code into the textbox below the grid. this document assumes that the reader is familiar with basic python programming and simple Object Oriented programming concepts. It would also be very useful for the reader to familiarize themselves somewhat with the workings of the Numeric library but isn't necessary to complete this tutorial. when you click the 'step' button, CAT executes the code that you've entered into the text box once for each cell of the grid, then displays the new state of the grid. to get a feel for how this works, enter the following code into the text box: c = on when you click 'step', this should set every cell on the grid to 255 (white). it should look like: similarly, entering: c = off should have the opposite effect, turning every cell off (the same as hitting the 'clear' button): 'c' is a variable (actually a Numeric array, but for now we'll pretend that it's just a simple variable. later on we'll take a closer look at it.) that represents the state of the current cell ('c' really stands for 'center'). in addition to 'c', CAT gives you access to variables called 'n','s','e','w','nw',ne','sw', and 'se' that represent the state of the cell to the north of the current cell, the state of the cell to the south of the current cell, etc. 'c' is really the only one that you'll be modifying though (if you modify any of the other variables, they'll be ignored). there are also some special variables made available: 'off' and 'on' are constants that correspond to all bits off or all bits on respectively. 'm_cnt' and 'vn_cnt' are the number of Moore neighbors (the Moore neighborhood includes all 8 immediate neighbors of the cell) and Von Neuman neighbors (the Von Neuman neighborhood doesn't include the diagonal neighbors ne, nw, se, or sw). 'm_total' and 'vn_total' are the respective counts plus the value of the center. to get a feel for the relationships between the variables try something like: c = n when you hit 'start', you should see everything shift steadily south. (unless the grid is uniform, in which case things are still working but obviously you won't see anything). this is because every cell is being replaced by the value of its northern neighbor. try setting c to the value of some of the other neighbors instead and make sure that it does what you would expect. most of the more interesting CA rules you'll encounter will require bitwise logical operations. these include '~' for negation, '&' for AND, '|' for OR, and '^' for XOR. if you don't know what those operations are, you'll have to consult your favorite python reference, symbolic logic text, bother your friendly neighborhood electrical engineer, or just experiment and figure them out for yourself. you'll also probably use '==' and '!=' for comparisons. the classic example of Cellular Automata is Conway's Game of Life. it has 4 very simple rules: if a cell has 0 or 1 neighbors, it dies from isolation if a cell has 4 or more neighbors, it dies from overcrowding if a dead cell has exactly 3 neighbors, it comes to life otherwise, it stays in whatever state it was in now to see how those logical operations are put to use, we'll convert those rules to the following python code (you'll probably want to randomize the grid, then hit the 'boolean' button before running this code): alive = (c == 1) & ((m_cnt == 2) | (m_cnt == 3)) born = (m_cnt == 3) & (c == 0) c = alive | born the first line sets a new variable 'alive' to '1' if the cell was already alive and has the right number of neighbors to stay alive. otherwise it is set to '0'. (remember that the 'm_cnt' variable is the total number of neighbors in the cell's Moore neighborhood). the second line sets another variable 'born' to '1' if it was previously dead but has exactly 3 neighbors. the last line just updates the cell's value. the OR operator sets the value to '1' if either the cell is still alive, or was just born. if neither is the case, the cell is set to '0'. it is also important to notice how CAT handles cells on the edge of the grid. the edges of the grid wrap around. the upper neighbors of cells on the top row of the grid are actually the corresponding cells on the bottom row of the grid and vice versa. you can think of the grid as the surface of a toroid. the Game of Life is a very simple CA that only requires two states 'alive' and 'dead'. what happens when we want to write CA rules that need more than just two states? CAT makes it fairly straightforward, but first we'll need to take a closer look at what those variables really are. As i mentioned earlier, the variables like 'c', 'n', etc. are actually Numeric arrays, rather than plain python variables. it's actually even more complicated than that; they are really 3-dimensional Numeric arrays. python's Numeric library does a fantastic job of letting you work with multidimensional arrays pretending that they are just regular variables, but eventually, you'll need to get under the hood to do anything really fancy with them. each variable is a stack of two dimensional grids of bits. we'll call each of the two-dimensional grids a 'bit plane'. there are eight bit planes for each variable. each bit-plane has as many rows and columns as CAT's main grid. for the purposes of writing CA rules, you'll almost never want to access individual cells or rows or columns of a bit-plane, but you probably will want to access the individual bit-planes now and then. luckily, this is easy: c[7] = 1 that command sets the most significant bit (in position 7; the least significant bit is in position 0) of each cell to '1'. if you run it on a randomized grid, you'll notice that it gets lighter. setting the next bit, c[6] to 1 will make it somewhat lighter still. at this point, if you understand how to work with Numeric arrays, you should be all set. otherwise, you're probably still confused and have no choice but to go read up on Numeric until things become clear. CAT comes with a number of example rules to get you started. Since CAT is a very general framework and is only intended for experimentation, it has some pretty serious limitations. secondly, it is not at all efficient. since any algorithm can be plugged in for the computation step, there are no cases that can safely be optimized away (eg, dedicated implementation of the Game of Life will usually only bother calculating the new state for cells that are in 'active' neighborhoods and won't bother at all with large swaths of dead cells since there's no chance that they'll change). CAT has to perform the calculation for every cell every single time through. CAT also aims to have a conceptual model that is easy to grasp rather than something more difficult that might be more computationally efficient. as a result, you'll probably find that CAT gets quite slow on large grids. CAT's design is based heavily on the CAM-6 machine developed at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and described in the book Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling by Toffoli and Margolus. It was written by Anders Pearson for the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning as part of the OPTIMUS project. Additional input and suggestions from Don Hopkins. colormaps so it isn't restricted to greyscale better drawing tools for manually manipulating things. more example rules and documentation convert to pygame? more user configurability. ie, menus to change size of grid, number of bit-planes, etc. make standalone executable version for windows more aggressive caching and table-building