3D Cellular Automata and GOL in the J programming language | Hacker News Reader

3D Cellular Automata and GOL in the J programming language

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34 pointseggy11 comments

This book set me off on CA: Cellular Automata A Discrete Universe. It's a great read and quite dense. I peruse it constantly for ideas and information.

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4702#t...

The author, Andrew Ilachinski, also did work in combat simulation.

I like APL and J so seeing CA implemented in J was also a draw.

Nice article, seems like the videos aren't available though. Am I going to have to install pov-ray on my phone?

I was messing around with 3d cellular automata with Next.js here is a gif if you're interested in some visuals. They're very easy to program.

https://media.giphy.com/media/q3adDCAhROIvkMey7h/giphy.gif

I’d like the cellular automata, indeed I tried to do a small library for this kind of thing. Does anybody of particular applications of them? A new model of computation? Would it be performant in current hardware architectures? Could I create a library to implement this paradigm?

They get used for procedural content generation, such as maps: https://blog.jrheard.com/procedural-dungeon-generation-cellu...

Interesting. Thanks!

It's used in fire spread prediction models and land use/urban growth models among other things.

SLEUTH is one such model adapted from a fire spread prediction model. We used it in modeling urban growth in the NYC region 2 decades ago, so it might not be the latest and greatest CA out there for urban growth. We calibrated the model on 1930 - 1980 data and validated it on 1990 and 2000 data, projecting into the 2050s for A/B scenario growth in the IPCC report of the period.

SLEUTH home: http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/gig/

Awesome! Thank you! Pretty useful stuff, applications in city planning and safety, I wouldn’t have guessed!

I would recommend reading Andrew Ilachinski's, "Cellular Automata, A Discrete Universe" as mentioned in my original submission post above:

https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/4702#t...

It's an amazing book even if it is a couple of decades old now.

Stephen Wolfram's, "A New Kind of Science" is also good. He has been studying and writing about CAs since the 80s.

CAs are used for many things. I am just starting to look at Ilachinski's work on combat simulation.

There was a paper comparing PDEs to CAs a while ago. I'll look up the link.

All the image links are broken.

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