I’ve been familiar with Cellular Automata for a while, and I generally tend to approve of them. Especially when they have some nice evocative qualities. We read and discussed Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science in one of my classes, which was a lot of fun. We really tore into it. My problem with the book is that while I appreciate and respect the ideas behind his work, the mathematician in me wants to wring the book until theorems come out, which of course they don’t, because there are no proofs.

I feel especially frustrated on that account because of the work I did with strange attractors. I found significant visual evidence that the parameter space for the attractors has fractal characteristics, but I was never able to prove it. Very sad.

Anyway, revisiting Wolfram led me to remember my use of cellular automata in GeneticImage, and thinking about how they could be used in Painter or other projects. I was quite pleased with the last applet posted regarding Painter, so due to this, I think I will post one with a cellular automata generator. This is primarily intended for artistic rather than any other purpose. Please fiddle with knobs and levers to your heart’s content!

Looks like applets don’t work for you

At long last, the storm is gone and the dust has settled. InTEL: Deployed, students are actually solving problems with it, this is a HUGE victory and step forward for the project. Mermaids: The social system is in place and functional. With some additional world building, things will be beautiful. Practice Qual: Completed, successfully. Granted, since I write at a terribly slow pace, it took twice as long as intended to actually submit it. That will become an issue for the exam upcoming, but I’ll just have to exert more discipline.

Otherwise things are mostly well. Audrey has been sick for the past week, but now seems to be recovering. All is working out in the end.

Work on UI for Painter continues with the Netbeans platform, which is encouraging and successful. The summer will call for prototypes of some research experiments. And where that winds up, who is to say.