More fun with cellular automata
I missed this when it happened, but Andrew Trevorrow and Tom Rokicki's fine program Golly, the most powerful software I know of for running Conway's Game of Life and similar cellular automata, is now available for free on Google Play for Android and on Apple's store for the iPad. I can now mess around with my tweaked variants of Life anywhere I go!
The Android version seems to get into an occasional crash loop on my Galaxy S4 if I push it hard, but otherwise it's great. Most of the features are there, including all the automaton types, the pattern library, the integrated Life Lexicon, and the remarkable HashLife algorithm, which for sufficiently regular patterns can do things like run them to quadrillions of generations and cosmic sizes. The Android version lacks Perl/Python scripting, auto-fit (though you can still hit a button to make the view fit the active region), and the "hyperspeed" feature that automatically accelerates the time step (only really useful with certain gigantic engineered patterns on HashLife). I think the viewing and editing interface is actually more intuitive than in the Mac/PC version.
I also just spent a little time messing with their more recent project, Ready, which generalizes cellular automata in all sorts of different directions: its main concern is simulating chemical reaction-diffusion systems, like the one that Alan Turing theorized as the source of spots and stripes on animal coats, but it can also run continuum automata like SmoothLife, 3D cellular automata and models on non-square grids (triangular, hexagonal, Penrose tilings, arbitrary lumpy surfaces). It can also use OpenCL to accelerate its math using your video 3D hardware. It's clearly in a more primitive state than Golly and is not as simple to play with, but what it can do is pretty amazing.
The Android version seems to get into an occasional crash loop on my Galaxy S4 if I push it hard, but otherwise it's great. Most of the features are there, including all the automaton types, the pattern library, the integrated Life Lexicon, and the remarkable HashLife algorithm, which for sufficiently regular patterns can do things like run them to quadrillions of generations and cosmic sizes. The Android version lacks Perl/Python scripting, auto-fit (though you can still hit a button to make the view fit the active region), and the "hyperspeed" feature that automatically accelerates the time step (only really useful with certain gigantic engineered patterns on HashLife). I think the viewing and editing interface is actually more intuitive than in the Mac/PC version.
I also just spent a little time messing with their more recent project, Ready, which generalizes cellular automata in all sorts of different directions: its main concern is simulating chemical reaction-diffusion systems, like the one that Alan Turing theorized as the source of spots and stripes on animal coats, but it can also run continuum automata like SmoothLife, 3D cellular automata and models on non-square grids (triangular, hexagonal, Penrose tilings, arbitrary lumpy surfaces). It can also use OpenCL to accelerate its math using your video 3D hardware. It's clearly in a more primitive state than Golly and is not as simple to play with, but what it can do is pretty amazing.