CimulA - A Cellular Automata Analyser

The code aims at being modular, well documented and easy to extend, but we implemented only what we needed.

Research articles written with the help of this code

http://cscs.umich.edu/research/projects/AFICS
Jean-Baptiste Rouquier et Michel Morvan, "Coalescing Cellular Automata". ICCS 2006, LNCS 3993 (part III) pages 321 - 328, april 2006.
We say that a Cellular Automata (CA) is coalescing when its execution on two distinct (random) initial configurations in the same asynchronous mode (the same cells are updated in each configuration at each time step) makes both configurations become identical after a reasonable time.
This paper proves coalescence for two elementary rules and show that there exists infinitely many coalescing CA. We then conduct an experimental study on all elementary CA and show that some rules exhibit a phase transition, which belongs to the universality class of directed percolation. nlin.CG/0610009 or DOI 10.1007/11758532_44.
more in preparation...

Documentation

The program consists in a single standalone executable:

./cimula

launches the simulator with default parameters and creates a fully documented file paramaters.ml, which you can edit. Read it to see all the possibilities of the program! Any parameter can also be passed on the command line to override the sttings of the configuration file.

 ./cimula --help

will print their name (but beware there are many parameters). Of course the configuration file is not overwritten if it already exists: remove it if you want to get the initial default values.

Compiling from the sources

Tested under Linux and Windows. You need ocaml. If you want to save snapshots of the display (Linux only), you need camlimages (if you know how to use camlimages under windows, please let me know!). So, if you're a Debian user:

apt-get install ocaml libcamlimages-ocaml-dev libx11-dev

Then simply

./configure
make

Documentation for developers