instructions on running cellular automata project

in terminal:


thoughts on the cellular automata project

at first thought, my ideas about cellular automata have changed quite a bit since my last rumination on the subject. i now see how each cell can basically be interpreted however you want, and the rules governing the life and death of said cells can be completely independent of the rules that interpret their states.

the best part of the project was writing chuck code to animate a sine wave in the calories ca visualiser. that took a good amount of time, but as i learn more about what goes into a sine wave and how to recreate one digitally, the function was there, it was just the display and rendering i was having trouble with. this boiled down to drawing one wave REALLY fast, then erasing it as i draw the next one. thinking back on it, this could have been simpler if i created a sine function and just manipulated instances of that.

the custom ca code itself is a slight modification of the 'game of life' rules, adjusted such that cells die more frequently and life is not handed out as freely. i really liked the 'trail' this left on my moving wave.

my original idea was to have the sound play some chords based on the location of the wave, and then 'trickle' out as the trail is left. this was hard in chuck as i just had to resort to scanning the cells in an orderly fashion at ultra high speed, which, slowed things down. i also lost track of timing because of how i was drawing the sine function, and so the notes it 'picked up' from the moving wave were somewhat random. currently, some combination of x and y position chooses a note to play, and also combination of these determines fm parameters. finally, at low valleys, special low notes are triggered to add a deeper background to round off the sound scene.

about the turk
i once knew a robot from turkey
whose movements, one might call quirky
played a mean game of chess
almost passed turings test
'til 'twas proved, his technology was murky

back to cellular automata
jeff o d cooper