elementary cellular automata (2020-07-17)

cell

Each cell consists of four values:

• its state
• red, green, and blue, colour channels

The cell’s state is an 8 bit value, allowing for up to 256 unique states.

rule

A rule consists of an index (representing the cell’s ancectors) and a new state value. The index is a 64 bit value to hold the states up to 8 ancectors.
For each cell, its ancectors are converted to an index into the rule set and its state is updated accordingly.

visualisation

A generation of cells is represented as a single row of pixels in the final texture, with each generation being stacked below. This gives time represented as the y axis.

initial conditions

Four initial conditions are available to choose from via keyboard shortcuts:

• 1: sets the central cell to 1
• r: randomly generates the first generation

todo

• clear texture on reset
• allow changing of rule sets at runtime
• allow creation of custom rule sets (via config file?)
• more states (should be trivial, rule set should already support it)
• add option to save images?