pyceau 0.0.2

2D cellular automata without colors using Moore neighbourhood

pyceau

Simple Python implementation of two-dimensional cellular automata using Moore neighbourhood. Simulation can be (un)paused using ^Z / SIGTSTP. Simulation can be stopped using ^C/SIGINT. pyceau stands for Python Cellular Automata.

See the demonstration for results using regular and concatenated rules. Please note that the website is only tested to be working with Chromium and video files don't seem to render in Firefox.

Disclaimer

May create seizures. Use this software at your own risk.

Flicker

Some rule sets are strenuous to the eye, because of heavy flicker. To alleviate this problem use the -p flag. You can choose between different modes 1, 2 and 3 via -m where 0 is default. It is advisable to use mode 1 for exploration of new rules because it works for most patterns.

Rules

The program allows to use Conway's Game of Life's rules and others. They can be given via the -r or --rules argument using either S/B notation or S/B/C notation. Random rules are allowed using the format -r lL+rR. l is the minimum, L the maximum number of elements for the left S rule set. r and R work analogously for the right B rule set. To allow maximum freedom on randomness of the rule sets, use -r 18+18.

Beyond regular S/B notation it is allowed to combine multiple rules together separated by commata ,. It is decided by the current tick which of these alternating rules are used. Each of these rules can also be prepended by a natural number and x indicating the number of times this rule should be successively repeated. An example combining both of these concepts would be the rule string -r 123467/0167,3x126/6.

This notation can be used for the regular rules via -r as well as the post-processing rules given via --post-rules.

Classical

Rule name	S/B notation
Conway's	23/3
Day and night	3678/34678

Stumbled upon

The following rules have been randomly found or at least partly crafted by either somebody else if annoted or myself. Flicker of rules marked with + can be filtered, flicker of rules with - cannot. = works sometimes. Numbers indicate a preferred filter mode given -m or --flicker-mode. Convergence describes time to reach a state without much change. + means it takes long, = normal and - short to converge. Stability describes that a system has sufficient change, but not too much to be reduced to noise. Convergence and stability are not yet operationalized.

S/B notation	Flicker	Convergence	Stability
01/015678	3+	-	-
0123/01234	3+	-	-
01234567/12345678	3=	-	-
012346/0123678	3=	++	=
012358/0238	1=	+	=
0135/012357	3+	+	=
01357/45678	0+	=	-
0/2	1+	+	-
0234/73	0+	++	+
02456/0123467	3+	++	+
03/02	3+	-	-
03456/012346	3+	+	=
035/012347	3+	=	=
035678/36 ¹	0+	=	-
1/0234	3+	-	-
12/024	3+	=	-
1234/4	1+	+	-
12345/01245678	3+	+	+
1237/137	0=	+	=
1238/0127	1=	++	=
1245/1234567	3+	++	=
12456/4567	1=	++	=
12457/04	1+	++	=
1256/3	0+	+++	=
13/34	1+	++	+
145/0128	3+	+	-
145/35	0+	-	-
23/0123	3+	-	-
23457/012346	3+	++	=
23457/05678	0+	+	-
2356/45 ²	0+	=	-
25/012346	3+	+	-
2568/35678	0+	+	-
3456/012356	3+	++	+
34567/68	1+	-	-
34568/46	0+	-	-
34568/5678	0=	=	-
347/356	0=	++	=
35/0678	0-	++	+
3578/06	0=	+++	=
4/012346	3+	-	-
4567/567	1+	-	-
5/078	1-	++	+
567/245678	1=	++	-
567/45678	1+	-	-
5678/1367	0=	++	-
5678/35678 ¹	0+	=	-

• ¹ David Eppstein
• ² Sören Wegener

To execute all of these one after another using the least strenuous flicker filter the following bash snippet may help:

for rules in $(grep -Eo '[0-9]+/[0-9]+ +\|' README.md | cut -d\  -f1); do
    mode=$(grep -E "^$rules\s+\|" README.md | awk '{ print $3 }' | cut -c1); [[ $mode =~ [0-3] ]] || mode=0
    pyceau -cr $rules -s 200 -m $mode
done

To cycle through ones with slow convergence (++) using ^C the following commands can be used:

for rules in $(grep -E '\+{2}' README.md | grep -Eo '[0-9]+/[0-9]+ +\|' | cut -d\  -f1); do
    mode=$(grep -E "^$rules\s+\|" README.md | awk '{ print $3 }' | cut -c1); [[ $mode =~ [0-3] ]] || mode=0
    pyceau -cm $mode -r $rules
done

More rules are to be found on Wikipedia.

Roles for S/B/C automatons can be found on the website of Mirek Wójtowicz.

Exploration

To explore and find new rules the following snippet can be used:

while true; do
   pyceau -r 18+18
   sleep .4
done

If interesting patterns emerge ^C can be held. sleep should be modified to match the keyboard's refresh rate to not start a new simulation too soon.

One dimensional simulations

To simulate all the rules from the list within a single dimension and create graphical "footprints" use the following snippet:

for rules in $(grep -Eo '[0-9]+/[0-9]+ +\|' README.md | cut -d\  -f1); do
    mode=$(grep -E "^$rules\s+\|" README.md | awk '{ print $3 }' | cut -c1)
    [[ $mode =~ [0-3] ]] || mode=0
    echo -e "\n$rules"
    pyceau -cr $rules -s 16 -m $mode -ud 80x1 | grep -vE '^$'
done

Note that grep is used to filter out empty lines that would otherwise disturb the output. While some of the rules give interesting patterns there are also duplicates (like 35/0678 and 3578/06). This is because the rules are still computed in two dimensional neighbourhood with a ring of size 1 in the second dimension. Wolfram code are usually used for one dimensional cellular automata and given S/B notation could be converted accordingly.

Arguments

Start the program using the --help or -? flag to see a current overview of allowed arguments.

Board

Setting the board manually is supported through the -b argument. This implies board size and therefore -d is not given. A sample 5x5 board with a glider can be given using the following notation:

-b 00000.00100.00010.01110.00000

• 0 dead
• 1 alive
• . new line

Suptitle bar

The subtitle bar can display different kinds of information. The following tables lists possible values for its format:

Format	Expansion
%r	Rules
%R	Rules (/ replaced with -)
%d	Dimensions (WxH)
%D	Dimensions (W-H)
%f	Flicker mode
%a	Flicker mode (alphabetic)
%s	Random seed
%S	Random seed ([, ] removed)
%t	Tick number
%T	Tick number (8 digits, preceding zeroes)
%i	Inversion indicator
%o	Render indicator
%p	Post processing rules and ticks

The default is %r %a %t %i and can be overwritten via -f. Image render file format is using %R-%D-%S-%a-%T.png per default.

Render images

You can render images with limited options.

Stills

The following snippet renders a still in img/0123-01234-48-32-DEMO-A-4.png:

pyceau -r 0123/01234 -s4 -m1 -d 48x32 -qe DEMO -i -1
xdg-open img/*

Image sequences

The following snippet renders all of the 3000 frames in the img directory. This will take some time:

pyceau -r 3456/012356 -s3100 -m2 -z2 -d 512x256 -e DEMO -i 100:-1:2 -q
xdg-open img/*

Videos

If you have executed the last snippet to create image sequences, you can then use ffmpeg to combine these into a video. A simple command to encode all the stills in the different subdirectories in img into a separate video each located in vid using WebM and VP9 is:

for dir in img/*; do
    id="${dir##*/}"
    ffmpeg -framerate 23 \
           -pattern_type glob \
           -i "$dir/*.png" \
           -c:v libvpx-vp9 \
           -pix_fmt yuva420p \
           "vid/$id.webm"
done

for rules in $(grep -Eo '[0-9]+/[0-9]+ +\|' README.md | cut -d\  -f1); do                                                                                                                                         :(
    mode=$(grep -E "^$rules\s+\|" README.md | awk '{ print $3 }' | cut -c1); [[ $mode =~ [0-3] ]] || mode=0
    pyceau -cr $rules -d 256x64 -m $mode -e DEMO 
done

After rendering has completed you can have a look at output.webm. See Tick spans below for further details.

Tick spans

To describe tick spans for -i the following notation is used:

• n describes a single page
• n,m describes both pages or ranges n and m
• n:m describes a range from n to m including m
• n:m:k describes a range from n to m including m with step size k

E.g. 0:2,5:9:3,-1 unfolds to the list [0, 1, 2, 5, 9] if the last tick is 9.

Note that there is also --render-ticks that does something similar for rendering to stdout.

Post-processing filters

After a step is taken according to the rules of the automaton its state can be altered for display using a post-processing filter. This filter is another automaton following rules specified via --post-rule. This filter is then applied as often as defined by --post-ticks for each tick.