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The Cellular Automata Simulation System

The system consists of a compiler for the Cellang cellular automata programming language, along with the corresponding documentation, viewer, and various tools. Cellang has been undergoing refinement for the last several years, with corresponding upgrades to the compiler. Postscript versions of the tutorial and language reference manual are available for those wanting more detailed information. The most important distinguishing features of Cellang, include support for:

Links2Go Cellular Automata

• named constants, including constant arrays with values read in from a file;
• any number of dimensions;
• compile time specification of each dimension's size;
• cell neighborhoods of any size (though bounded at compile time) and shape;
• positional and time dependent neighborhoods;
• associating multiple values (fields), including arrays, with each cell;
• associating a potentially unbounded number of mobile agents [ Agents are mobile entities based on a mechanism of the same name in the Creatures system, developed by Ian Stephenson (ian@ohm.york.ac.uk).] with each cell; and
• local interactions only, since it is impossible to construct automata that contain any global control or references to global variables.

The currently release also supports 3D viewing using OpenGL. Although at the present, viewing anything with more than several thousands active cells is somewhat slow, as processors become faster and hardware support for the 3D graphics more pervasive this will continue to improve.

Both a UNIX and a Windows NT version of the system are available. Please note that Windows NT users will need to use the WinZip command to unpack the Windows NT version of the system. An older version of the system is available for the Apple Macintosh. My special thanks to Axel Kowald for updating his Apple Macintosh port of the system. I am grateful for his work and willingness to make it available to others.

The UNIX version supports the X11, Iris Graphics Library, and OpenGL windowing systems and can generate shared memory multi-threaded code for multi-processor Sun and SGI machines. Both the UNIX and Windows NT versions also support the use of microvectors, which can greatly (by a factor of 5 or more) increase the speed at which some cellular automata execute.

The distribution is about 20 MB unpacked. Nearly all of the size is a GNU C compiler and various utilities for the Windows NT installation. These items are also present in the UNIX distribution (though they aren't used). They are in the wintel subdirectory and can be safely removed (after installation in the Windows NT case) in order to save space.

A small, but growing, set of examples should help to illustrate the capabilities of the system. Many are straightforward implementations of well known automata. If you decide to use the Cellular system, any contributions that you would be willing to make to the examples page would be greatly appreciated. Contributions should be addressed to the author of this page.

From May 1993 through May 1997, this work was jointly supported by Radford University and USRA as part of a NASA/JOVE grant. During June and July of 1997, the work was supported by a grant from Fuji Research Institute Corporation. The 3D viewing capability was added in the Summer of 1998 as part of a research grant from the US Army Research Lab. The ability to perform computations in floating-point was added in the Summer of 1999, also as part of a research grant from the US Army Research Lab.