Cellular Automata Playground

In 2012, during an undergraduate Java class I had grown bored with the course material, which seemed to be moving too slowly. As I have done at several points during my academic career, I decided to undertake a secret project of my own out of personal interest. Since this was around the time that I had first started looking into CA models, I decided to write a program to implement them. I also went into the project with the goal of making something nice and user-friendly that could be presented to anyone. At the time I had no intention of releasing it, but since starting a GitHub account and later an itch.io account I have decided to make it publicly available.

This is a slightly updated version of the Java program that I originally wrote in 2012. It displays a grid which can be clicked and dragged to draw patterns of live and dead cells. There are time controls at the bottom adjust how quickly the system evolves. The menus at the top contain a variety of options including randomly seeding the grid, adjusting the grid size, and adjusting the CA rules. Several well-known CA models are included, such as: Conway's Game of Life, halite crystal growth, Seeds, Brian's Brain, and even/odd rules.

If you'd like to play around with the source code, you can find the GitHub repository for this project here.