CimulA - A Cellular Automata Analyser
Sourceforge project
page (download)
The code aims at being modular, well documented and easy to extend, but
we implemented only what we needed.
Research articles written with the help of this code
- http://cscs.umich.edu/research/projects/AFICS
- Jean-Baptiste Rouquier et Michel Morvan, "Coalescing Cellular Automata".
ICCS 2006, LNCS 3993 (part III) pages 321 - 328, april 2006.
We say that a Cellular Automata (CA) is coalescing when its execution on two
distinct (random) initial configurations in the same asynchronous mode (the same
cells are updated in each configuration at each time step) makes both
configurations become identical after a reasonable time.
This paper proves coalescence for two elementary rules and show
that there exists infinitely many coalescing CA.
We then conduct an experimental study on all elementary CA and show that some rules exhibit a phase
transition, which belongs to the universality class of directed percolation.
nlin.CG/0610009 or
DOI 10.1007/11758532_44.
- more in preparation...
Documentation
The program consists in a single standalone executable:
./cimula
launches the simulator with default parameters and creates a fully
documented file paramaters.ml, which you can edit. Read it to see all
the possibilities of the program! Any parameter can also be passed on
the command line to override the sttings of the configuration file.
./cimula --help
will print their name (but beware there are many parameters). Of course the configuration file is not
overwritten if it already exists: remove it if you want to get the
initial default values.
Compiling from the sources
Tested under Linux and Windows. You need ocaml. If you want to save snapshots
of the display (Linux only), you need camlimages (if you
know how to use camlimages under windows, please let me know!). So, if
you're a Debian user:
apt-get install ocaml libcamlimages-ocaml-dev libx11-dev
Then simply
./configure
make
Documentation for developers