Cellular Automata Software: A Mini-Workshop

• Introduction
• Contact
• Program
• Bureaucracy

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Introduction

Many people nowadays know about cellular automata, especially Conway's Game of Life. Browsing the Web, it is easy to find applets and scripts that display on screen the temporal evolution of specific cellular automata. The instances of general-purpose cellular automata software, however, are quite rare.
The purpose of this miniworkshop is to provide an occasion and an environment where cellular automata theorists and practitioners can meet with software developers and enthusiasts, to exchange knowledge and opinions on some of the cellular automata software available to the researchers and to the wider public.

Contact

Silvio Capobianco. Email: firstname at cs dot ioc dot ee

Program

The mini-workshop shall take place in the afternoon of Tuesday, August 31, 2010, in room B101 starting from 2PM.
The program will follow these guidelines:

• A short introduction to cellular automata.
  Speaker: Prof. Jarkko Kari (University of Turku).
• Three presentations of cellular automata software:
  1. ACML, developed by Guillaume Theyssier, a general-purpose cellular automata software developed in OCamL.
     Speaker: Pierre Guillon (University of Turku)
     Abstract: here
  2. Golly, developed by Andrew Trevorrow and Tomas Rokicki, a Game of Life simulator which implements several algorithms, comes with a rich library of initial patterns, and supports scripting in Perl and Python.
     Speaker: Charalampos Zinoviadis (University of Turku)
     Abstract: here
  3. SIMP/STEP, developed by Ted Bach as his PhD thesis project under the supervision of Tommaso Toffoli, a general cellular automata simulator that implements the philosophy of "programmable matter" (Toffoli and Margolus, 1991), is built as a Python module and performs "experiments" written in that language.
     Speaker: Silvio Capobianco (Institute of Cybernetics)
     Abstract: here
  Each presentation will last no more than 30 minutes.
• An "install fest" where people will be able to try the software on their personal computers.
• An "exercise session" where the different "teams" suggest specific cellular automata for other people to implement on the installed software.

Bureaucracy

The mini-workshop is open to everyone and will follow a "free-for-all" formula. Everyone is invited to contribute, ask questions, or just watch.

It would be good to have an indication on how many people will participate. If you plan to attend, please contact Silvio Capobianco.

This workshop is supported by EXCS -- Estonian Centre of Excellence in Computer Science

Last update: August 26, 2010