Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!hiebeler
From: hiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov (David Hiebeler)
Newsgroups: comp.theory.cell-automata
Subject: Re: How is CALAB?
Message-ID: <`-M$~9$@rpi.edu>
Date: 2 Jul 90 07:26:04 GMT
References: <715.268d681f@desire.wright.edu>
Organization: Theoretical Division, Los Alamos Nat. Lab; RPI CS Dept
Lines: 58


  CA Lab has been brought up before on this group.  Basically, I'll
summarize the comments I made before -- CA Lab is an OK package, but I
don't think it's "serious" enough.  There are plenty of cute demos,
such as running Life on a picture of the starship Enterprise, or
making Timothy Leary's face diffuse, and that kind of stuff.  There
are also some good physics simulations, but in my opinion, not enough
of them.  CA Lab was also mentioned earlier this year in Dewdney's
"Mathematical Recreations" (formerly "Computer Recreations") column in
Scientific American.

  It is good that you can write CA Lab rules in C, Pascal, BASIC, or
Assembly, but that's pretty simple to do with any package.  For
example, even though the CAM-6 uses Forth as its main language, you can
still easily write short programs in your favorite language to dump
out rule-tables in the proper format.

  And, in my opinion, the run-time environment of the CAM is much more
flexible/programmible.  Forth isn't necessarily great, but much of
what you program at that level looks fairly readable -- you can even
get it to look almost like English -- while CA Lab requires you to
program the run-time stuff in assembly, as far as I can tell.

  I don't want to come off sounding totally negative toward CA Lab --
it's good for fooling around with CA's, but I don't think it's good
for moving on to serious experiments.

  In fact, I'm not just shamelessly criticizing here -- I'm currently
working on a CA package that will have the features and flexibility I
need; I'm moving fairly slowly since I'm busy with other things, but
perhaps later this year a preliminary version will be ready.  I've
been working with CA for a few years, and have used various packages
ranging from CAM-6 to CA Lab to Cellsim (I currently maintain and am
developing Cellsim),  and am incorporating the best features from all
of them, as well as the new features I feel are worthwhile.  I'm also
developing a new user-interface to the CAM.

  I recently wrote up a review of CA simulation packages, which will
be appearing in the Physica D journal later this year, as an appendix
to the proceedings of the 1989 Cellular Automata held at Los Alamos.
I believe preprints will be available from the publisher for $3.50 or
so, but I don't have details on that yet.  Unfortunately, I can't just
give away copies, as it would violate the publishers' copyright.

  I also have a brief summary of the packages mentioned in that
article, that I will send to anyone who wants it.  It mentions the
following CA packages:
 CAM-PC (and CAM-6), CA Lab, CA Sim, Cellsim, LCAU, Mathematica
(there is a small CA package available for Mathematica).

  Disclaimer: Although several of my employers work in the field of
cellular automata, I am speaking only for myself here.

-- 
Dave Hiebeler                      | Internet: hiebeler@heretic.lanl.gov
Complex Systems Group              | Bitnet: userF3JL@rpitsmts
MS B213, Theoretical Division      | UUCP: crdgw1!automtrx!hiebeler
Los Alamos National Laboratory  /  Los Alamos, NM 87545  USA