dhone-asu / CAWorkshop

Cellular Automaton Workshop

Overview

CA Workshop allows the user to create a user-defined elementary cellular automaton using a native scripting language.

The language for defining the cellular automaton consists of the following keywords:

• blocksize <size>: defines the number of cells in a rule block
• background <color>: instructs the engine to initialize the image with the specified color
• colors <color1> <color2> … <colorN>: defines the colors the CA will use
• setpixel <X-coordinate> <Y-coordinate> <color>: turns on a pixel with the specified color before processing rules
• dim <width> <height>: defines the dimensions of the image to be generated
• rules: begins a rule block
• endrules: ends a rule block

Individual rules are declared in the following format:

• [ <lcolor1> <lcolor2> … <lcolorN> ] = [ <rcolor1|_> <rcolor2|_> … <rcolor3|_> ]

where the “_” symbol instructs the engine to print nothing in the cell position.

Any named color defined by JavaFX is allowed, as well as any hexadecimal RGBA color of the form #<hex_number>, where “hex_number” is a 32-bit hexadecimal value.

For example:

[ black black black ] = [ _ white _ ]

An example script is included below:

blocksize 3
background white
colors black white
dim 200 200
setpixel 100 0 black
rules
    [black black black] = [_ white _]
    [black black white] = [_ white _]
    [black white black] = [_ white _]
    [black white white] = [_ black _]
    [white black black] = [_ white _]
    [white black white] = [_ black _]
    [white white black] = [_ black _]
    [white white white] = [_ white _]
endrules

Running CA Workshop

The easiest way to run CA workshop is to clone the repository using IntelliJ IDEA. The repository URL is https://github.com/dhone-asu/CAWorkshop