Cellular Automata Art

We all know how much fun it is to rigorously analyse Cellular Automata. But there is so much more to them, and when a day's hard work is over, it's good to grab a pot of tea and sit down to code up and run the rules in series, to provide one rule with another's output, and be able to control this on the fly. When, at time t, you like the look of a composition, it can be saved. This page contains the products of my labour with CA's. There are individually saved frames and several MPEG sequences.
The Hardware I used in the creation of these images was initially an HP Apollo 9000 under HP-UX, but more recently I've been on a Pentium 100 under Linux, which has surprised me with its performance (the display interface class I use is X). The software is mostly my own, but Mark Spychalla helped me initially with the X interface and David Griffeath helped me with many CA concepts.

Snapshots

[Gnarly Gallery]

MPEG movies

Try looking at the mpegs frame by frame to trace the incremental development...

MPEGBirth of a slime creature (120k)
MPEGFrom Conway to a flower (160k)
MPEGSequence in symmetric asymmetry (930k)
MPEGDemise of 'the man' (UPL's faculty advisor) (438k)

More...