my 2nd foray into cellular automata

gravity demo

this was my attempt at writing a universal cellular automata capable of running any 'atomic' ruleset given a constrained number of states. after quickly discovering the performance limitations of a naive approach to CA implementation I, decided to write the engine to split work across 4 threads. I have since learned that the 'real' solution to the problem would be to write a shader that can leverage the parallel comupting power of the gpu. Nevertheless this provided a substantial speed-up to processing large grid areas and was an educational process for me to learn about writing multi-threaded programs. included are a couple scripts to help create rule definitions. There was once also a web-based visual rule editor that I quickly hacked to export rule files in a compatible format to run with this. Unfortunately I lost track of this. I may try to recreate that functionality in the future.

this toy was made with LÖVE: https://love2d.org/ you will need to install it to your computer to try it out. Once you have you may simply git clone this repo cd into it and run love .

• click and drag with LMB to draw
• click and drag with RMB to pan the view
• 1, 2, 3 & 0 to select the cell type to draw
• scroll with mouse wheel to zoom in and out
• r to reset the simulation (sets each cell randomly)
• p to pause (useful to draw fun stuff in GoL)