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General Purpose Cellular Automata Programming

In this thesis, a new cellular automata simulation environment, jTrend, is introduced. jTrend was developed on the Java platform for cellular automata exploratory research. With a built-in high-level programming language and an easy-to-use graphical user interface, jTrend has become one of the most powerful cellular automata simulators, and can be used for most one- and two-dimensional cellular automata simulations.

My queries about DSLs for cellular automata didn't get many responses, so perhaps this master thesis would be of interest.

The language design isn't very radical, and the language is quite easy to grasp. The integration between the language and the simulation environment is a bit unusal (e.g., the cells neighborhood isn't defined in the code).

By Ehud Lamm at 2005-07-14 13:18 | DSL | other blogs | 12990 reads

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OT & Thinking out too loud

Can you think of a "CA step" as a filter/convolution of the state signal?

If yes, does this make sense, e.g. could you apply techiques from DSP to solve CA problems?

By Michael Walter at Thu, 2005-07-14 16:26 | login or register to post comments

DSP

I'd say almost always no, at least a naive approach wouldn't work. The problem is the state transformations are virtually never linear transformations of the state. Further I imagine if they were the CA would be rather boring, the nonlinearities seem to be where the interesting parts of CA and similar things comes from.

By Derek Elkins at Mon, 2005-07-25 17:44 | login or register to post comments