points by DonHopkins 2 years ago

I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page.

CelLab:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/

https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm

>CelLab History

>(A more detailed history of cellular automata appears in the CelLab User Guide.) The first edition of CelLab was developed by Rudy Rucker and John Walker in 1988 and 1989 when both were working in the Autodesk research lab. The package was to be the first title in the "Autodesk Science Series", which would use computer simulation to explore aspects of science and mathematics. The product was first shipped in June of 1989 at a suggested retail price of US$59.95, under the name Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory. Rudy went on to complete the second title in the Science Series, James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software which used programs developed by Rudy and another Autodesk programmer, Josh Gordon, to illustrate aspects of James Gleick's bestselling book. CHAOS -- The Software shipped in November of 1989. Rudy was working on the third title in the series, Artificial Life Lab, and John was developing the fourth, Home Planet, when Autodesk's management decided to close the research lab and terminate development of the Science Series. Rudy finished Artificial Life Lab, which was published as a book plus disk by The Waite Group Press in 1993. John released Home Planet as a freeware program in the same year, and the current version can be downloaded from this site.

>The demise of the Science Series orphaned Cellular Automata Laboratory, which disappeared from the market in 1994. Rudy and John explored the idea of a new edition with several publishers, but none seemed to be interested. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, software can be distributed at a minuscule fraction of the cost of packaged software in the 1980's, so this seemed a natural way to get Cellular Automata Laboratory back into the hands of creative people interested in exploring massively parallel computing. Re-launching a program developed almost a decade ago required a modicum of work; a new cellular automata simulator that runs under Windows was developed, the User Guide, originally a 265 page book typeset using LaTeX, was transformed into an HTML document for the Web, and Java was added to the languages one can use to define cellular automata rules, being ever so much more with-it than Pascal, BASIC, and C.

>So now it's finished, or at least at large again. Ideally, CelLab will never be done, not as long as folks continue to use it to explore the world of cellular automata and share their discoveries with other pioneers on this frontier of computing.

Documentation:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/

It includes a huge illustrated index and description of many different cellular automata rules:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html

The story about the origins of CelLab is fascinating, telling about how Rudy Rucker learned FORTH just so he could program CA rules for Toffoli's and Margolus's CAM-6 hardware:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/chap5.html

Original Windows product, released i 1989, Autodesk Cellab 1.0 - installed files:

https://vetusware.com/download/Autodesk%20CELLAB%201.0/?id=4...

Cellab, Exploring Cellular Automata from DOS era in DOSBox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RnZWJV1_wKI

Cellular Automata by Rudy Rucker:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE

Programming the CAM-6 Cellular Automata Machine Hardware in Forth (CAM6 Simulator demo):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Forth/comments/zm0ggl/programming_t...