The Linear Cellular Automata Applet

Most Recent Change: Fri Jan 2 00:47:33 1998 UTC.

You're either not loading Java applets or your browser doesn't support them. In either case, you're welcome to the source code.

A non-technical description of CellAuto1d

The applet first randomly assigns a number to each of the dots in the top row (each number is shown as a different color). It decides what the next row should look like by adding together the three numbers above each dot (above left, directly above, and above right) and feeding that number into a rule that was also randomly generated. It then displays the new line below the previous one (wrapping back to the top when it hits bottom) and repeats forever.

The results vary greatly, depending mainly on the program's choice of a rule: sometimes all you see is a mishmash, sometimes boring solid colors -- and sometimes, intricate interweaving patterns that seem never to repeat. To help you to find "interesting" patterns, there are buttons that let you scramble the rule, scramble the state, or (most useful) scramble both the rule and the state simultaneously.

You can instruct the applet to strive to calculate 1 to 200 new rows per second, though most computers probably won't do more than 25-50 updates/second without a JIT compiler. If you choose "Zoom!" for updates/sec, the applet will run at its top speed, though the resulting updates aren't very smooth.

As always, you're welcome to the source code.

s-max@pacbell.net