modelling CAs in swarm?

[Phil Knight]

I'm a delurking swarm user who rates somewhere just over 3 on Glen's
user scale (3 - those who have successfully installed Swarm and played
with the provided demos, but haven't made their own models, 4 -  those
who are actively using Swarm).

I'm interested in using swarm to explore cellular automata, specifically
to model physical phenomena (i.e. digital physics or Fredkin's universe
as a CA). In order to get started I set up a sim of Conway's Life. This
is literally a two minute job to wrap a model swarm around the pre-
supplied life class.

Since I'm likely to want to utilise relatively large lattice spaces
(ultimately in 3d), and the life class is implemented with a bog
standard 2d array, I set about cobbling together a sparse matrix version
of life and I've now succeeded in getting this up and running. The
initial world size is specified and seeded with the desired probability,
the initial world area is constantly displayed on a raster, but the
lattice iteslf extends to 32k x 32k (it should be possible to increase
this even further). In actual fact the app will also run more than just
the life rule, allowing any 2d, binary, totalistic, Moore neighborhood
CA to be simulated by specifying the appropriate birth/survival rule
before running. 

For anyone who's interested, both apps are available at:
http://www.pknight.demon.co.uk/
I should emphasise though that they are very hacked together and not
intended to be the best or most efficient means of construction. At this
stage I'm just trying to explore methods of modelling CAs on large
lattices rather than providing serious models. Any constructive
criticism is more than welcome.

The real purpose of this post is to ask firstly if anyone else here is
using swarm for CAs, especially on large lattices and if so, the
approaches being used in the models.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, one area that I'm really going
to want to work on is visualisation tools (esp. 3d). For example, the
sims above only display the initial lattice size, but the "active"
lattice in the sparse version quickly becomes much larger, so there is a
requirement to be able to zoom in/out of different areas of the lattice.
I haven't yet thought too much about 3d visualisation tools as yet, but
hope this post might stimulate some discussion :-)

-- 
Phil Knight


                  ==================================
   Swarm-Modelling is for discussion of Simulation and Modelling techniques
   esp. using Swarm.  For list administration needs (esp. [un]subscribing),
   please send a message to <address@hidden> with "help" in the
   body of the message.
                  ==================================