WolframCA

About WolframCA

WolframCA is an app to demonstrate 1-dimensional cellular automaton (CA). This was inspired by chapter 6 of Allen B. Downey's excellent book, 'Think Complexity', where he describes the set of CAs as presented by Steven Wolfram in a set of early 1980s papers.

For the impatient, a quick overview of CAs is here:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ElementaryCellularAutomaton.html

However a PDF of the 'Think Complexity' is freely available for those who want more detail:
http://www.greenteapress.com/compmod/

Further work by Dr. Steven Wolfram:
http://www.wolframscience.com/

The application allows selection of one of the 256 (rules 0-255) elementary cellular automata - as you scroll down the screen, it will generate the appropriate number of time steps to fill the available space. There is an option to change the resolution/zoom from 1 pixel per cell to 16px per cell. The lower number of pixels per cell, the more detail you can fit on the screen, but the more processing that has to be done (and therefore the slower the app may run, especially on older single-core devices).

This application was written to support android devices 2.3.3 (API 10) and higher. It currently requires no specific permissions.

WolframCA is open source, licensed under Apache 2.0 with limited permission from, and no affiliation with Steven Wolfram, LLC. The code can be found at: https://github.com/barryoneill/WolframCA