Simulation of 1D non-Wolfram Automata in Golly?

[Arhenius77]

Golly is a really nice program; however, it'd be nice to be able to simulate 1D CAs as good as it simulates 2D ones. Are there ways to simulate k state, r range 1D CAs in Golly?

[Saka]

You can make ruletables but it can only go to range 1...

[dvgrn]

Or... this is kind of cheating, but it works: you could simulate k-state, r-range CAs with a Python or (preferably) Lua script -- turn on cells individually with g.setcells(), or calculate a row at a time and use putcells(). At each stage you'd only have to look at the bottom row of g.getselrect().

1D CAs are much less computationally intensive than 2D CAs, so with a little optimization you could get a reasonably fast script -- though it couldn't compete with HashLife, of course.

You could simulate somewhat higher k and/or r with a multistate rule table, up to k*r=256 I suppose, if you built a script to write the appropriate rule table for you, and maybe to set up initial conditions correctly.

[Arhenius77]

I see... Is there any chance that they could be implemented in Golly 3.0 similar to how the Wolfram Automata are now?

[dvgrn]

I see... Is there any chance that they could be implemented in Golly 3.0 similar to how the Wolfram Automata are now?

Well, no, not in 3.0, because the final-we-hope build is already done.

It could happen for Golly 3.1, whenever that comes out -- if someone wrote and tested all the code for a new algo and contributed it to the project. There haven't been a lot of requests for that particular feature, so that's the most likely way that it would happen (ahead of all the other things that could be done next...!)

Probably best to start with a nice easy Lua script. If huge numbers of fascinating discoveries come out of running the script, that would make eventual native support in Golly a good bit more likely.