Rust Cellular Automata

This is a command line tool to simulate and search the space of simple cellular automata (with relatively small neighborhoods).

The tool outputs CA simulations in the form of GIF files.

Example

The following command will run a CA with a rule numbered 16855021099980290151. The initial configuration is specified in exploding.pat (by default it is random). The CA has 3 states and is 128x128 cells. We want the output GIF file to represent 2400 time steps, but displaying only 1 in 10.

target/release/rust_ca -n 3 -f rules/3_states/16855021099980290151.map.comp \
-p patterns/exploding.pat -k 10 -s 128 --delay 0 -t 2400 

This results in the following test.gif file:

Build the tool

Run the following command to build:

cargo build --release

The CLI usage is:

Rust CA 0.1.0
Hugo Cisneros <hmj.cisneros@gmail.com>
A CLI CA simulator. With no options, this runs a randomly sampled CA rule with 2 states for 50 steps
and outputs it as a gif file test.gif

USAGE:
    rust_ca [OPTIONS]

FLAGS:
    -h, --help       Prints help information
    -V, --version    Prints version information

OPTIONS:
           --delay <delay>                    [default: 10]
        -f, --file <file>
            File to read a rule from. The file must contain a valid rule for the corresponding
            number of states

        --horizon <horizon>                [default: 1]
    -p, --pattern <pattern>
    -r, --rule-sampling <rule-sampling>
            [default: dirichlet] [possible values: uniform, dirichlet]

    -s, --size <size>                      The size of the 2D CA grid [default: 128]
    -k, --skip <skip>
            Steps to skip at every time step for the output [default: 1]

    -n, --states <states>                  Number of states of the CA [default: 2]
    -t, --steps <steps>                    Simulation time [default: 50]