Cellular Automata - be in the know

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Year 2001

October 2001

• Giles Edkins discovers a large number of Brian's Brain oscillators using his own search program. Brian's Brain rule was traditionally treated as too vigorous to have stable patterns. The first oscillator has been discovered by Michael Sweney in 1999, 20+ years after the rule has been defined!

September 2001

• Mirek Wojtowicz releases the next version of his MCell, 4.20. The new version introduces a new kind of DLLs - User Configurable DLLs - that allow to define parameterized rules. It also offers many user interface extensions. The full list of news in version 4.20 is available here.
   
• Mirek Cellebration has moved to http://www.mirekw.com. Previous two locations, http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/ and  http://www.mirwoj.opus.chelm.pl will still be updated and will serve as mirrors. 

July 2001

• Brian Prentice has defined and thoroughly explored the new CA family, called Weighted Generations. The rule is a natural extension of the Generations and  Weighted Life families. The new family has been implemented in MCell as a user-configurable DLL.

May 2001

• Mirek Wojtowicz releases the fourth version of his MCell. The new version is even more complete - it handles 1D and 2D rules in von Neumann, Moore, extended Neumann, extended Moore, Hexagonal and Margolus neighborhoods.
  The full list of news in version 4 is available here.

April 2001

• George Maydwell announces two new Web Pages:
  Modern Cellular Automata, which illustrates user directed evolution of cellular automata rules starting from the Brian's Brain rule, and
  Color Game Of Life Visual Exploratorium, where he experiments with of Conway's Game of Life in Color.

February 2001

• Gil Bub has created an interesting site with Cellular Automata Examples. His first article covers cellular automata application in modelling cardiac dynamics. The site also features a small Java applet allowing exploring Greenberg Hastings model.
   
• George Maydwell has released the second version of his popular Cellular Automata explorer, SARCASim. The new version offers DirectX full screen support, symmetry, and other enhancements.

January 2001

• George Maydwell has released a Collidoscope, a versatile and beautiful Cellular Automata screen saver for MS Windows.
   
• Paul Callahan's Game of Life site has moved to http://www.radicaleye.com/lifepage/.

Year 2000

November 2000

• Jason Rampe releases the updated version (27.05!) of his Visions of Chaos (see July 2000). The new version clears the problems with high resources demands and runs smoothly on all Windows versions.

October 2000

• John Elliott publishes the Cellsprings/DT, a desktop (offline) version of his java applet for running various 2-dimensional Cellular Automata (see June 2000).

September 2000

• Johan Bontes' Life32 v.2.0, the best Windows simulator of Game of Life and related rules, entered the Beta-testing phase. The new version has a much extended user interface, allows CA explorers for creating libraries of handy patterns, offers running patterns in limited space size, handles Hexagonal rules and von Neumann neighborhood, introduces a multi-document interface, loads and saves patterns in BMP/GIF formats, loads patterns saved in MCL format, and more.

August 2000

• Tim Tyler publishes a series of new Java applets:
  - HexHAL (Hexagonal Hardware Artificial Life),
  - Crystal_1D (a new class of self-reproducing cellular automata),
  - Crystal_2D (template-based self replication. a sequel to Crystal_1D),
  - Particles (a particle simulator).

• Ben Schaeffer releases version 2 of his powerful LifeMN package. The new version offers even more tools for developing 2-state Weighted Life rules. The new version is also capable of storing rules and patterns directly in MCell format.

• John Elliott continues the development of his Cellsprings Java applet. Version 1.15 is capable of running rules defined in external plugins, which John calls Springlets. The first springlet implements a class of Hexagonal rules.

July 2000

• Jason Rampe releases the first public version of his uniquely versatile and free program Visions of Chaos. Visions of Chaos is a program that generates fractals, Cellular Automata, attractors and other chaos related simulations. The program covers a wide range of Cellular Automata, including the Ant Automaton. Other CA highlights are the possibility of creating AVI movies and MIDI music out of the simulations.
  The program runs with 32-bit Windows, although Windows 95/98 users can have problems with preparing the system with enough free system resources (about 95% are required).
  

• Mirek Wojtowicz collects a large set of patterns for  the famous WireWorld automaton; they are available in his MJCell Java applet and in MCell 4 Beta.

June 2000

• John Elliott publishes the first version (currently in Beta) of Cellsprings, a java applet for running various 2-dimensional Cellular Automata. Cellsprings gracefully replaces John's Webside CA applet and introduces many new features, like the possibility of saving designed rules and patterns to the server and a much more comfortable (and modern) user interface.

April 2000

• Jeffrey Ventrella publishes a small yet very innovative Cells application allowing developing CA rules by means of natural evolution. The user's role is to judge each population as either bad, medium, or good. Based on this judgement the rules evolve, preserving "good" features and forgetting "bad" ones. After a short time rules are getting more and more interesting!

March 2000

• Mirek Wojtowicz publishes the first 'release' version of his MJCell Java applet.
  The most important addition is the ability to load patterns available on-line. The applet is accompanied by over 1000 such patterns. It runs now over 230 CA rules, and for the first time allows users to define and experiment with their own rules.

• StarLogo 1.0, a programmable modeling environment for exploring the workings of decentralized systems, has been released. This new version, implemented in Java, runs on all different types of computers. Most notably, it is the first version of StarLogo to run on PCs.

• Jim Tyler, webmaster of Lotus Artificial Life, has released a superb "Diffusion" Java applet allowing exploring gasses and other reversible cellular systems. The applet runs 3 different neighbourhoods: Margolus, Q*Bert and Star of David. All predefined automata are completely reversible!

February 2000

• Ben Schaeffer has released version 1.0 of his long-awaited (and free) LifeMN CA explorer. LifeMN is a 2 state, 2 weight, configurable neighbourhood, mouse driven, CA rules explorer for Windows 95/98. What makes this program exceptional in the ease one can discover and develop new rules with. Most of Weighted Life rules available in MCell were created with this tool. The program is available for downloading from http://www.effectnet.com/bens/lifemn.htm.
  
  P.S. I was lucky to see Beta of LifeMN 2.0. My advice is: stay tuned on Ben's software...

January 2000

• Martin Schaller announces the first Beta version of the CA-Browser, an innovative combination of Java and Java-Script that allows to browse through a large number of one-dimensional CA-rules. This version works best with IE5.
  http://members.surfeu.at/martin.schaller/complex/cabrowser/cabrowser.html

• Stephen Silver updated his great Life Lexicon; it's already the 13th edition of it. The lexicon is available for downloading at http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm.

• David Eppstein (http://www.ics.uci.edu/~eppstein/) has found the first period 7 spaceship in Conway's Game of Life:
  .....*....*.....
  .....*....*.....
  .....*....*.....
  ...**********...
  ..*.*......*.*..
  ......*..*......
  .**....**....**.
  ***..........***
  *.*..........*.*
  ***..........***
  It's also the new speed - the spaceship travels 2 cells every 7 cycles (2c/7). Stephen Silver comments that it's the first new velocity for four years.

• The new version of MCell, 3.0, has been released.
  The new version is especially attractive for programmers who get a possibility to write plugins for MCell and to write more effective User DLLs. The full list of news in version 3 is available here.

Year 1999

December 1999

• Michael Sweney discovers two great CA rules: Ebb&Flow and Brain 6 and constructs many amazing patterns for them. Ebb&Flow and Brain 6 are first (after StarWars) non-classic CA rules with so many engineered patterns.
  
• Michael Sweney discovers the first oscillator in the famous Brian's Brain rule. As far as I know no stable patterns were known in the rule so far.

November 1999

• Thanks to the courtesy of David Griffeath and the University of Wisconsin Mirek's Cellebration has a mirror site in USA, at the address http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/.

October 1999

• Mirek Wojtowicz announces the first public Beta version of MJCell Java applet running over 120 Cellular Automata rules.

• David Bell announces an updated archive of objects for the Day & Night Cellular Automata. Most new patterns come from Paul Schick.

September 1999

• John Elliott revamps his very popular Webside CA Java applet.
  The new version (1.0) contains much enhanced user interface, many new rules and initial patterns.

• Ben Schaeffer constructs a number of very interesting Weighted Life rules. They all are implemented in MCell 2.11 and are described in the CA rules lexicon.

Webmaster: Mirek Wojtowicz http://www.mirekw.com

MCell mirrors: USA  http://psoup.math.wisc.edu/mcell/ Europe  http://www.mirwoj.opus.chelm.pl

Last update: 15 Dec 2001