Cellular Automata rules lexicon

Type: depends to the rule

"Special rules" game contains non-standard rules that cannot fit into any other game and cannot be programmed as external DLLs due to violation of syntax or MCell principles. Currently only one rule exists here - "Traffic CA" by David Griffeath and Larry Gray. It's a probabilistic one-dimensional rule that cannot be programmed as an external DLL because it can modify 2 cells when certain neighbourhood conditions are met.

The syntax of each "Special rule" can be different.

Traffic CA

Traffic moves to the right, so the only possible transitions are of the form 10 to 01 at some pair of adjacent sites. Four paramaters – a, b, c, and d – govern such transitions, synchronously in time. The advance probabilities are:

• acceleration - probability of moving if there is a 1 to the left and a 0 to the right.
• braking - probability of moving if there is a 0 to the left and a 1 to the right.
• congested - probability of moving if 1's surround the 10 pair on both sides.
• driving - probability of moving if there are 0's on both sides.

The text notation of Traffic CA rule has the "TRCA,a,b,c,d,p1,p2" form, where:
TRCA - fixed prefix,
a,b,c,d - acceleration, braking, congested, driving; values in a range <0..1>,
p1, p2 - probability of placing new cars on left and right side; values in a range <0..1>.

MCell built-in Special rules

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 Sep 2001