Scribd
Upload
35 views3 pages

04 Elementary Cellular Automaton

Elementary Cellular Automaton (ECA) is a discrete modeling technique used to study patterns that emerge in nature. ECA consists of an array of cells that can be TRUE or FALSE. For each iteration, a new state is computed based on the current state and a set of rules. There are 256 possible rules. The program is to output iterations of the automaton given a rule number, number of cells, and initial conditions.

Uploaded by

Anna Shin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
35 views3 pages

04 Elementary Cellular Automaton

Elementary Cellular Automaton (ECA) is a discrete modeling technique used to study patterns that emerge in nature. ECA consists of an array of cells that can be TRUE or FALSE. For each iteration, a new state is computed based on the current state and a set of rules. There are 256 possible rules. The program is to output iterations of the automaton given a rule number, number of cells, and initial conditions.

Uploaded by

Anna Shin
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

Elementary

Cellular Automaton

Elementary Cellular Automaton

Elementary Cellular Automaton (ECA) is a discrete modeling technique used in science and engineering to
study the behavioral patterns that emerge in nature. For more information see
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html.

The state of the automaton consists of an array of N cells that can take either a TRUE or FALSE state. For
each iteration, a new state is computed based on the current state and a set of rules for the automaton.

The new state for cell i is calculated based on the previous state of cell to the left (i-1), same position (i), and
to the right (i+1). If the state happens to coincide with an edge (e.g., when i=0 ), then the "imaginary" cell is
assumed to be FALSE.

There are 2×2×2=8 possible binary states for the three cells neighboring a given cell as shown in the table
below. Furthermore, there are a total of 2^8=256 elementary cellular automata, each of which can be
indexed with an 8-bit binary number. This is usually known as a rule. For example, rule 30 (30 base 10 =
00011110 base 2) is shown in the table below. In the diagram, the previous state’s left, middle, and right
cells are shown in the top row and the second row shows the current cell in the new state being modified.

The rules for this assignment are as follows:

For example, consider the case where N=10 and it is set as follows for state j :
Then, to calculate state j+1 , we need to iterate through every cell as follows. For each case, the neighbors
are highlighted to make it easier to see.

When i=0 , the previous state is {FALSE, FALSE, TRUE}, which corresponds to rule #7 that says the result
should be TRUE. Note that in the previous state, the cell at i-1 does not exist, so we assume it is FALSE.

Then, we can calculate the next cell at position i=1 which corresponds to rule #6.

Continuing on, we see the following changes for i=2 through i=9 .

Thus, the new state has a different pattern of TRUE/FALSE cells. The process then repeats starting with the
new state.

The cellular automaton ends after the cells reach a steady state (no more changes from one iteration to the
next) or one reaches a maximum number of iterations.

Task

Write a program that can draw any rule in the elementary cellular automaton given a rule number, integer N
for the number of cells, and initial conditions for the cells. The program should output the automaton until
either of the two terminating conditions is met.

Input

The input will contain the following single-space separated parameters:

1 <= Rule # <= 256


0 <= Maximum number of iterations to print < 1000
8 <= Number of cells, N <= 64
0 <= Integer representing initial condition for N cells <= 2^64 -1
(where the binary representation shows the TRUE/FALSE state of the N cells)

Output

The program should output the iteration number formatted as a left-aligned 3-digit number padded with
spaces. Then, each iteration of the automaton should be displayed with cells marked as TRUE shown as an
asterisk character (*) and cells marked as FALSE should be a space character ( ). The cells in the state
should be surrounded by dashes to make it easier to differentiate when the empty states are.
Note: There is a newline character at the end of the last line of the output.

Sample Input 1

30 20 8 16

Sample Output 1

You might also like