Cellular Automata

Some references on the topic of cellular automata:

• Cellular Automata: Digital Worlds. A very good introduction to the concepts of cellular automata. You really should take a bit of time and read (or skim) through it.
• Cellular Automata at Wikipedia...
• Rules of the Game... (life and death). A look at the ruls of the "Game of Life", a bidimensional cellular automata.

Topics:

• the basic building block: a cell (remembers its own state)
• a lattice of cells
• rules: define the next state of the cells (generations)
• neighbourhood: defines the scope of the rules

Unidimensional automata

A very good introduction is here (thanks to Luke):

• http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html

(and the very cool Ring Tone Generator based on cellular automatas)

Here's the example I developed over last class. It implements a one-dimensional automata. Each cell of the automata is a small state machine with just two states. The transition between states is determined by the state of its two adjoining neighbors...

• fabric.sc

Another example (rhythm.sc), by Matt Wright, in which each cell is interpreted as a rhythmic position within a "bar".

Bidimensional automata

A java version of Game of Life... and another one, and even one in three dimensions!