gotomata

README

gotomata

A concurrent, sparse grid framework for working with cellular automata inspired by Steven Wolfram's A New Kind Of Science.

The three dimensional cellular automata were inspired by the very excellent softology blog post. 3d rendering of the cellular automata is done here as well. I know nothing about rendering and basicially copied the code from Raylib-go outright. In particular, I used their shaders from the mesh_instancing example.

How it works

A grid of cells is sharded based on the number of CPU's your machine has. This allows for parallel computation of the next state of the grid based on the specified neighborhood and ruleset functions.

When instantiating a grid, you specify a default state which allows the grid to be sparse. Only cells that are not the default state will be stored across the shards.

Just about any grid type should be supported because all a coordinate is, is a list of integers. Thus, you define what a coordinate means. For a typical 2 dimensional square grid, this is the standard (x,y) coordinate pair. But you can just as easily use hexagonal coordinates (q,r) because neighbors are computed by a user defined function. (The geometry of the grid is essentially determined on read instead of hardcoded)

Thanks to go generics, cells store arbitrary data allowing for complex automata. Mostly commonly booleans can be used to store on/off states, but ints can be used to model several states. Much more complex states can also be represented using custom structs provided they implement the necessary methods to make the comparable.

Sample Usage

I recommend checking out the 1-d continuous as an example of some implementation. (Hopefully this will be easier to implement later, for now things are internally exposed) Then you can run it with:

initCfg := continious.SetRandomConfig(width)
continious.MainContinious(width, steps, 10, initCfg)

Visualizations

The famous rule 30

Continuous Cellular Automata

1D 3 Color Totalistic Cellular Automata

Hexagonal Growth

Sample Conway Game of Life

Random Walk

3D (Still a work in progress)