On Nov 10, 2007 12:24 PM, apfelmus
Note that depending on your concrete setting, you may not need a fancy ring structure for cellular automata. And with simple automata like
I realized that I never updated my automata once a row was created, and ended up using an unboxed array with an index to represent the ring. I just do some math when I want to "rotate" left or right and the index falls off the edge. The rules are much more complex though. I am using a genetic algorithm technique to "evolve" 7 bit rules which can classify if an initial row was mostly black or mostly white. This is loosely related to a class assignment. I'm finding that taking 100 initial rules, determining their fitness on 100 initial automatas, and doing that for 100 generations is taking a loooong time. Our teacher's implementation, in C, does it in about a minute. Mine takes hours :( . I think its becuase the C algorithm does a lot of bit-twiddling to iterate the automata, while I'm using lists of integers (1, 0). Anyways, thanks for your thoughts! Justin