jwmills@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Jonathan Mills) (12/22/89)
EduCalc catalog #46 carried an announcement for what appears to be an IBM PC program, "Cellular Automata Laboratory." designed by Rudy Rucker and implemented by John Walker (who developed AutoCAD). Quoting from the ad: "The latest computer graphics craze -- real-time, self-generating movies! "Use these visible computations to simulate turbulence, heatflow, gas mixing, predator-prey ecologies, eorosion, crystallization -- or just for fun. "...CA Lab offers you a great variety of visual feasts plus applications to predicting biological systems and physical phenomena, as well as the design of massively parallel computers." End quote. Now, has anyone used this program? If so could you post a brief description of features such as PC compatibility, memory required, speed, number of planes or cell resolution, programming language (CAM-Forth?, CA-BASIC?), compatibility with the CAM-6, and so forth? The program comes on four 5 1/4" floppies, but how much of this is program and how much is the "visual feast" isn't stated -- but those "movies" are no doubt a large part. The cost is $59 US, EduCalc's number for ordering is 1-800-633-2252 Ext 536, or 1-714-582-2637. They are located in California. Anyway, it would be useful to find out how good this program is before purchasing it. Rudy Rucker has written a number of books popularizing mathematics and logic; and also, if I recall correctly, written some amusing "recursive" comics ("Wheelie Willie" comes to mind), and described his conversation with Kurt Godel during Godel's later years. So CA Lab may have some interesting slants. Thanks in advance, Jonathan Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405-4101 USA (812) 855-6486
hiebeler@TURING.CS.RPI.EDU (Dave Hiebeler) (12/23/89)
I've used Rucker's CA Lab, but not much. That's mostly by choice, as it's not really what I'm looking for. I don't know about its PC compatibility, memory requirements, and don't remember how fast it went (I do know that it seemed awfully slow, after getting used to CAMs and Connection Machines though :-) ). I believe it allows you to write rules in Basic, Pascal, and C. The program is not really compatible with CAM or Cellsim. By that, I mean at the rule-programming level; CA Lab might be able to read in CAM-6 lookup tables though. (I suspect it can, as it's not hard to do). The reason I don't remember any of the details, and can't look them up, is because I don't own the package; someone I know has a copy, and I tried it out for a while a couple of months ago. The reason I was not impressed with the package is because I was looking for something with more science. Rucker's program has lots of silly/fun demos such as running the Zhabotinski reaction on Timothy Leary's face, running heat-flow on the starship Enterprise, and so on. While he does have some worthwhile physical experiments in there as well, I thought the silliness/physics ratio was a bit too high. I do enjoy some silly demos to make life more pleasant, but not that many. I wasn't impressed with the book/documentation that came with the package either. Much of the book was Rucker and Walker talking about "Why cellular automata?" While I feel such questions are important, it seemed that there was way too much fluff. If anyone has read Dewdney's January 1990 "Computer Recreations" column in Scientific American, there is a quote by Rucker: "I feel that science's greatest task in the late 20th century is to build living machines... This is the computer scientist's Great Work as surely as the building of the Notre Dame cathedral...was the Great Work of the medieval artisan." Most of what Rucker says in the CA Lab book sounds like this. Walker is a little more "down-to-Earth", but I wanted something more along the lines of the "Cellular Automata Machines" book by Toffoli and Margolus, that you get when you buy the CAM. By the way, in Dewdney's article there is a picture of "Life" being run on an image of the Enterprise, if you're interested. :-) I know this might come across sounding like a bad review, but I don't want it to be. I'm sure there are many people who would like Rucker's program. This is my own personal opinion, and my reason for not really liking the program is just that it is not what I'm looking for. I should also add a disclaimer here: I am involved with a new company (Automatrix, Inc.) that is developing CA hardware and software. While we are not currently "competing" with Rucker in this area, I do plan to write a PC-based CA package in the near future that is more oriented toward physical modeling, as I've been working on Cellsim on Sun workstations for about 7 months now, have used CAM-6 for a couple of years, and think I can put together a decent package. Hopefully someone else who has used CA Lab can offer some comments, to paint a more objective picture of the package. Dave Hiebeler hiebeler@turing.cs.rpi.edu Computer Science Dept hiebeler@cardinal.lanl.gov Amos Eaton Bldg. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Troy, NY 12180-3590
morgan@nolichucky.rtp.dg.com (Keith Morgan) (12/26/89)
There's a mini-review of the Cellular Automata Laboratory in the computer games section of the (I believe) latest issue of Scientific American. It sounded like a pretty interesting toy for those that like to play with automata, but not in the same league as a h/w tool like the CAM-n boards. If it's the one I'm thinking of (there were two CA packages reviewed in the article), one of the more cutesy features is the ability to import a picture to use as the seed for a run; One series of illustrations shows the starship Enterprise dissolving into an amorphous soup. Keith Morgan Data General, Research Triangle Park, NC morgan@dg-rtp.dg.com (Internet) "Better a Quest Perilous than a Pest Querulous."