Kenny Dewhirst

In my Artificial Life class, one of our assignments was to build a deterministic cellular automata. These are distinguished from totalistic CA’s like Conway’s Game of Life in that the positions of their neighbors matter. Each of the squares in the grid represents a cell; the black ones are ‘alive’, and the gray ones are ‘dead’.

The CA can be set to run a single step, or to run several, refreshing the drawing between each. The seed button will randomly set each cell on the grid to alive or dead.

The program can save the current state out to a file, and then load these files back into the program.

My CA allows the user to enter a rule by in a separate tab by checking a box for each of the possible states in a von Neumann neighborhood. The number generated at the bottom of the pane is a 32-bit number, derived from the 32 states. It provides a unique identifier for the rule set.

Download the C# source code here.