Complex Systems and ALife Created by Cellular Automata
(Java applets and many related links)
by Tomoaki SUZUDO
(Japanese is here)

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[Java Applets ] [CA Links ] [Complex System Links ] [ALife Links ] [Evolutional Computation Links ] [Nonlinear Science Links ] [Webmaster ]
The icons for hyperlinks:
  1. [new] : A newly added information
  2. [good] : An excellent link
  3. [demo] : A cellular automaton demo using applets

What's new?

  • New conference
    ACRI 2006 Seventh International conference on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, September 20-23, 2006

    Download

    My gear for complexity research is a Java program of a 2-dimensional cellular automata tool, called Cambria (was called CADemo). As you see below, anyone can download my program including source codes. If you have a problem to decompress this file or want another compression format, please contact the Webmaster.

    and my old gear. ( Warning!! I'm no longer maintaining this program as 2D CA is too slow. As the source code is available, please use this not for a complete tool but programming ingredients.)


    JAVA-applet demos of Cellular Automata (CAs)

    All the the demos you see here work on 2 dimensional (2D) space. In fact, 2D CAs are most commonly used by CA researches. This is probably because 1D CA cannot produce various self-organized patterns of interest, and also it is difficult to show 3D CAs on the computer screen. The applet runs on Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) or Netscape 4.0 (or later) in Win32, and Internet Explorer 4.0 (or later) in Macintosh. Netscape 4.72 on Intel/Linux seems OK. If the picture gets broken, select slower updating from preference button.

    I want to remind you that the sign of [demo] means a direct link to the applet demo. If you do not know where to start, please try the first applet 'Aquarium' which is a set of my original CAs designed for Alife study. What I am trying to do now is to establish a more realistic simulation of artificial chemistry. The first thing I abandoned was the synchronous update over the whole space. This change removes the patterns dependent on the synchronous update which is not essential to chemical dynamics. The second change was to introduce the mass preservation. This is, needless to say, essential to realistic chemical simulations. For this purpose I adopted a partitioning scheme.

    The following are imported rules. This is not a comprehensive list, just the ones I like.

    [Cr83] Creutz, M. "Microcanonical Monte Calro Simulation'", 1983 Phys. Rev. Let. , 50-19, 1411-1414.
    [De89] Dewdney A. K. "Computer recreations", 1989 Sci. Am., 261August, 102-105.
    [Fi90] Fisch, R.. "Cyclic cellular automata and related process", Physica D 45, 19-25 (1990).
    [Ga70] Gardner, M. "Mathematical games", 1970 Sci. Am., 223 October, 120-123.
    [Ga71] Gardner, M. "Mathematical games", 1971 Sci. Am., 224 February, 112-117.
    [La84] Langton, C. G. "Self-reproduction in cellular automata", Physica D, Vol. 10, 135-144(1984).
    [Su99] Suzudo, T. "Crystallisation of two-dimensional cellular automata", Complexity International,Vol. 6 (1999). to download pdf-formatted file

    Cellular Automata Links

    Tutorial sites
    Downloadable tools and demonstrations
    Online Papers

    Complex Systems Links

    ALife and related links

    The origin of life is mysterious. Obviously life was created from inanimate objects, and is composed of them. We know each molecular is not life, but they gain mind or an intention once they organize certain patterns.

    One of the fundametal question on life is whether we can create life, for instance, on our computers? A computer with mind sounds like a science fiction and it is natural to suspect the possibility of artificial life, but many people are seriously triying to solve this problem.

    This problem starts with discussing what kinds of capacity we have to give computers to be life. You may make the list of common properties every living organism has, but it is not obvious what are essential and what are not to be life. One of the possible ways to answer this question is to imagine what are necessary for the origin of life or primodal life. I think it is possible to narrow down the list to a few properties. The first one is self-replication. Without this, any species cannot survive. The second one is evolution. This simply means ability to change. Without this any living organism cannot adapt to a new environment. Earlier I thought only these two were necessary, because it seemed any primitive self-replication system with the evolution capacity could survive and become intelligent life. On computers, however, people already succeeded to make some modest self-relication and evolution. Even if you put them together, it does not seem to evolve into life with mind. I wondered what are missing.

    Another prominent property of life is redundancy. For instance, a damage of a part of DNA is mostly compensated by another parts. It seems genes are organizing a network, and the production of necessary protain is guaranteed by many ways. Life is amazingly robust. What made or can make life so rubust? This is, I reckon, self-organization. The important thing is that the two essential abilities described above, to self-replicate and to evolve, were not given by anybody, but spontaneously acquaired. Thus these capacities of life are robust. So the third property is rubustness of the two properties. Consequently, I believe that to create life is to create self-organized self-replication and self-organized evolution, but nobody knows how to do it.

    Related links are :

    Evolution and Evolutional Computation Links

    Chaos, fractal and nonlinear science links

    The webmaster

    Dr. Tomoaki Suzudo
    Research Group for Advanced Reactor Systems
    Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute
    Tokai-mura, Naka-gun, 319-1195, JAPAN

    Publications related to cellular automata for complex systems

    Please let me know your WWW sites or software tools of cellular automata generating complex and life-like patterns. They may be listed here and linked to my Japanese CA related page. Recommending someone's useful sites or softwares are also welcome.

    The E-mail address of the webmaster is
    tsuzudo_at_qb3.so-net.ne.jp (Replace _at_ with @).
    Note that I do not read any mail with an attached file or more.
    Last modification on 17 January, 2004