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| (Form. Definitions) | Contents | Index | (..CA in SCARLET..) |
The software package SCARLET 0.85, which is intended for simulations
of cellular automata,
may be used on all computers where the operating
system SUN Solaris, version 2.0 or bigger, is installed.
From a X11 window interface the user can load a CA and controle
the simulation. During the simulation the user can choose a two-dimensional
sector of the retina that will be displayed by SCARLET. It contains
information about positions and states of the shown cells.
To specify the CA which should be simulated, SCARLET - like
many other software packages of this kind - offers an own programming
language consisting of two components
(RDL and
SDL), whose syntax is similar
to the one of C. While SDL is chiefly used to design a table for the
local rule function
and to specify a proper neighbourhood,
RDL is used to describe initial configurations.
Only later SCARLET will take two
matching RDL and SDL programs
stored in different files to create a complete CA.
The software package SCARLET permits the user to model any standard CA with any cube shaped retina he could think of, if it does not exceed the available ressources of the computer system. Moreover it provides a built-in function to gain random numbers, which may be a powerful tool to create probabilistic CA as well.
Other generalizations of the standard CA are not directly supported.
But nevertheless it is often possible to reduce them to a standard CA
using additional states or neighbours. At that point, SCARLET helps
the user providing a possibility to use compounded data structures as
state set.
Like that CA which are inhomogeneous in time or space could be
designed adding a component that contains information about the time or the
cell position to the state
structure, and modifying the local rule table.
Enlarging the neighbourhood will also allow to simulate simple kinds of
variable boundary conditions (e.g., a torus).
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| (Form. Definitions) | Contents | Index | (..CA in SCARLET..) |