Introduction

SRCA is a Cellular Automata (CA) simulation system that I have built over the last few years in order to support my interest in exploring self-assembling systems and self-coded reproduction. I'm publishing it on the web as a means of showing some of the rules I have developed and allowing you to experiment with them.

SRCA has been designed specifically to support the types of CA rule that I am interested in developing. The main characteristic of these rules is that they are very complex, with large numbers of cell states per cell (2^32 or more). They also tend to have other common characteristics of which SRCA can take advantage to reduce RAM use and increase (update) speed. Moreover, I intend to develop and change the SRCA architecture as necessary to suit the rules that I develop.

SRCA will also run simple rules reasonably well (it includes three: Conway's Life, Banks2 and Chris Langton's Self-Replicating Loop), but there are probably better CA applets and applications available for that purpose. The CA Links section lists some of these - some are also suitable for more complex rules.

You may wish to develop your own CA rules. Unfortunately SRCA in its present form is not suitable for this purpose (without access to the full source code, which I wish to keep fully under my control for the time being). This is something I intend to put right in a future release.

As indicated earlier, I have very much designed SRCA to suit my own purpose and plans. I have put in a lot of time and effort over the architecture, UI design, coding and ensuring a robust system. But that doesn't extend to some of the detailed polishing that you would expect of a commercial application. So there is no help system, no proper tabbing, no keyboard shortcuts, and no installation program. I may address some of the tabbing and shortcuts issues in future releases, but it is unlikely I shall ever bother with help or installation programs. My priorities now are to develop some better rules and to improve the update performance.

Changes compared to the Applet

SRCA is based on my 'Self Reproducing Cellular Automata Loops' Java applet, but has many improvements. The main ones are:

• Ability to edit lattice patterns
• Loading and Saving of lattice patterns to file
• Ability to display the detailed (decoded) state of each lattice cell.
• Some more rules. The only new one of mine is SRLEN which a slight variation on SRL(8).
• A different architecture that should form a solid foundation on which to further develop the system.

Download

For requirements and to download the application, proceed to the SRCA download page.

Running SRCA

For usage instructions and information, refer to srca.html (note that 'srca.html' is also included as part of the SRCA download).

CA Links

Here are some external sites that I have found useful or interesting.

General Information on CA and Related Systems

• The Primordial Soup Kitchen
• Lotus Artificial Life
• Paul Callahan's Page of Conway's Life Miscellany

You could also try the newsgroups 'comp.ai.alife' and 'comp.theory.cell-automata'.

Self-Replication using CA

For general information, programs and links see Lotus Artificial Life. For more specific information related to SRCA and my SRL rules see DTR which contains a family of CA rules that give rise to simple self-replicating systems, including an implementation of Chris Langton's replicating loop automaton. It also contains some CA programs with which to run the rules, but it is the information that is the most useful.

General CA Applications and Applets

These are CA that have caught my attention, either because I have used them or they have had favourable comment on the web or they just looked interesting. It is not an exhaustive list. The only ones I have used in earnest are Cellular and CA Lab (which was the predecessor to CellLab). Some of the others I have recently played with a bit, but that's about it.

• Cellular: I have found the linux version of this application to be excellent for developing and debugging fairly complex rules (and it handles simple ones as well). It has its own language in which to express rules and an associated compiler. There is now an NT version available, according to the web site. (I originally started development of my SRL rules using Cellular, until they became too complex to be manageable without the ability to call functions from within rules. Assuming I can produce some simplified versions of the SRL rules, which I think I can, I'll publish them for Cellular in addition to my SRCA application.)
• Cellab
• MCell and MJCell
• SARCASim
• Cellsprings
• Alan Hensel's collection of life patterns and applet
• Life32