https://github.com/mmower/cell-culture-1
A first go at Langston's cellular automata in the browser
https://github.com/mmower/cell-culture-1
Last synced: about 2 months ago
JSON representation
A first go at Langston's cellular automata in the browser
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/mmower/cell-culture-1
- Owner: mmower
- Created: 2013-05-03T18:56:52.000Z (about 12 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2013-05-03T19:49:44.000Z (about 12 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-02-07T14:45:41.216Z (3 months ago)
- Language: JavaScript
- Size: 281 KB
- Stars: 0
- Watchers: 2
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
# cell-culture-1
I'm reading **Complexity** by M. Mitchell Waldrop and was intrigued by his description of a very early experiment in cellular automata by Chris Langton.
So Langton started programming his computer for every parameter that seemed half way reasonable. And he got absolutely nowhere - until, one day, he tried
one of the simplest parameter he could think of: The Greek letter lambda, as he called it, was just the probability that any given cell would be "alive"
in the next generation. So if a rule had a lambda value of precisely 0.0, for example, then nothing would be alive after the first time step and the rule
would clearly be Class I (referring to Wolfram's 4 Universal Classes). If the rule had a lambda value of 0.5, then the grid would be boiling with activity,
with half the cells alive on the average, and half dead. Presumably such a rule would be the chaotic Class III. The question was whether lambda woudl reveal
anything interesting in between.
To test the parameter, Langton wrote a little program telling his Apollo to automatically generate rules with a specific value of lambda, and then run a
cellular automaton on the screen to show him what the rule would do.
Partly as an experiment to re-familiarize myself with Javascript and partly because I wanted to see what Langton saw I've tried to recreate it in the browser.
Assuming I haven't misunderstood you can [see it too](http://htmlpreview.github.com/?https://github.com/mmower/cell-culture-1/blob/master/src/cell_culture_1/index.html)
## Credits
* Bootstrap: http://twitter.github.io/bootstrap/
* jQuery: http://jquery.com/
* bootstrap-slider: http://www.eyecon.ro/bootstrap-slider/
## License
Copyright © 2013 Matt Mower