tmeacham@desire.wright.edu (07/01/90)
Hello, I have recently heard about some software called CALAB which apparently allows one significant latitude in designing CA's. Has anyone out there used this, and if so could you please post or send a report on it, including sources for it and the cost. Thanks, Tom Meacham
bkoball@cup.portal.com (Bruce R Koball) (07/02/90)
Tom Meacham writes: >I have recently heard about some software called CALAB which apparently allows >one significant latitude in designing CA's. >Has anyone out there used this, and if so could you please post or send a >report on it, including sources for it and the cost. I believe you're referring to a product called "Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory", published by Autodesk, Inc., 2320 Marinship Way, Saulsalito, CA 94965, 415-331-0356, ISBN# 0-922414-72-6, toll-free order number 800-525-2763, price $70 (approx.). CA Lab runs on IBM PC-compatible platforms and is actually two separate programs. The first, RC, is an interactive, low resolution CA driver that will run on virtually any PC display configuration, including monochrome displays. Although its resolution is limited to 80 X 25 cells (80 X 100 on some systems) it is very fast, with an update rate of > 30 frames/sec on a fast 386 machine. RC provides a range of canned CA rules from which to select, along with a "control panel" function to alter some system parameters during runtime. The user may also create new rules in a limited fashion. The second part of the package, CA, is capable of running 320 X 200 cells with 8 bits of color information per pixel. This requires a machine with a CGA, EGA or VGA display (VGA is the most effective). Although this driver has many more cells it still manages a respectable update rate of > 1 frame/sec. It also has a much more flexible method for defining rules, essentially allowing any rule to be programmed in a few lines of C, Pascal, or even Basic. While CA Lab is certainly not as powerful as CA hardware accelerators like Toffoli's CAM-1/CAM-2 machines, and thus not a tool for high-end CA research, is still much more than a toy, and an excellent introduction to CAs in general. I highly recommend it! (no, I don't work for Autodesk :-) A word of warning: it can be highly addictive and the novelty does not wear off! Autodesk's main claim to fame is their highly successful PC-based CAD package, AutoCAD. Rather than resting on their laurels, however, Autodesk's visionary leaders (I don't use the term lightly) are financing R&D projects into some fascinating, but not immediately commercial, areas. Among them are virtual reality systems, cellular automata, and chaos theory. They currently have VR systems running on 386-based PC platforms (not commercially available yet). Due out soon (if not out already) is a product called Chaos Lab, based on much of the material covered in James Gliek's (sp?) popular work, "Chaos". Rudy Rucker is an associate professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Jose State University and a recent addition to the Autodesk brain trust. His official title there is "Mathenaut". Rucker is also well known as one of the progenitors of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. His novels, "Software" and "Wetware", are classics in the field. He has also authored several popular non-fiction works on math theory and has recently been teaching courses in CA theory at SJSU, whence came CA Lab. Bruce Koball Motion West 2210 Sixth Street Berkeley, CA 94710 415-540-7503 bkoball@cup.portal.com
hiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov (David Hiebeler) (07/02/90)
CA Lab has been brought up before on this group. Basically, I'll summarize the comments I made before -- CA Lab is an OK package, but I don't think it's "serious" enough. There are plenty of cute demos, such as running Life on a picture of the starship Enterprise, or making Timothy Leary's face diffuse, and that kind of stuff. There are also some good physics simulations, but in my opinion, not enough of them. CA Lab was also mentioned earlier this year in Dewdney's "Mathematical Recreations" (formerly "Computer Recreations") column in Scientific American. It is good that you can write CA Lab rules in C, Pascal, BASIC, or Assembly, but that's pretty simple to do with any package. For example, even though the CAM-6 uses Forth as its main language, you can still easily write short programs in your favorite language to dump out rule-tables in the proper format. And, in my opinion, the run-time environment of the CAM is much more flexible/programmible. Forth isn't necessarily great, but much of what you program at that level looks fairly readable -- you can even get it to look almost like English -- while CA Lab requires you to program the run-time stuff in assembly, as far as I can tell. I don't want to come off sounding totally negative toward CA Lab -- it's good for fooling around with CA's, but I don't think it's good for moving on to serious experiments. In fact, I'm not just shamelessly criticizing here -- I'm currently working on a CA package that will have the features and flexibility I need; I'm moving fairly slowly since I'm busy with other things, but perhaps later this year a preliminary version will be ready. I've been working with CA for a few years, and have used various packages ranging from CAM-6 to CA Lab to Cellsim (I currently maintain and am developing Cellsim), and am incorporating the best features from all of them, as well as the new features I feel are worthwhile. I'm also developing a new user-interface to the CAM. I recently wrote up a review of CA simulation packages, which will be appearing in the Physica D journal later this year, as an appendix to the proceedings of the 1989 Cellular Automata held at Los Alamos. I believe preprints will be available from the publisher for $3.50 or so, but I don't have details on that yet. Unfortunately, I can't just give away copies, as it would violate the publishers' copyright. I also have a brief summary of the packages mentioned in that article, that I will send to anyone who wants it. It mentions the following CA packages: CAM-PC (and CAM-6), CA Lab, CA Sim, Cellsim, LCAU, Mathematica (there is a small CA package available for Mathematica). Disclaimer: Although several of my employers work in the field of cellular automata, I am speaking only for myself here. -- Dave Hiebeler | Internet: hiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov Complex Systems Group | Bitnet: userF3JL@rpitsmts MS B213, Theoretical Division | UUCP: crdgw1!automtrx!hiebeler Los Alamos National Laboratory / Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA