I love Rudy Rucker's ingenious SciFi stories, as well as the cool CALab stuff he did with John Walker at Autodesk!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806736

DonHopkins 20 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Psychedelic Graphics 0: Introduction

Here's a classic video by Rudy Rucker demonstrating his CALab product that he made with John Walker at Autodesk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyZUzakG3bE

At 24:28 he shows a running Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction mapped onto a 3d model's texture:

https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=1468

I wrote about it in the discussion of John Walker passing away, and Josh Gordon, who worked on Chaos at Autodesk, joined the discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39300605

>DonHopkins 11 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: John Walker, founder of Autodesk, has died

>I really love and was deeply inspired by the great work that John Walker did with Rudy Rucker on cellular automata, starting with Autodesk's product CelLab, then James Gleick's CHAOS -- The Software, Rudy's Artificial Life Lab, John's Home Planet, then later the JavaScript version WebCA, and lots of extensive documentation and historical information on his web page. CelLab:

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/classic/

https://www.fourmilab.ch/homeplanet/

https://www.rudyrucker.com/oldhomepage/cellab.htm

[...]

>josh_gordon 11 months ago | prev [–]

>I'm amazed that my beloved CHAOS still runs beautifully on emulators like DOSbox. It was the last programming project where I could completely roll my own interface - and maybe my last really fun one.

Here's some stuff I did that was inspired by Rudy Rucker and John Walker's work, as well as Tommaso Toffoli and Norm Margolus's wonderful book, "Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37035627

by DonHopkins on Aug 7, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

>"Cellular Automata Machines: A New Environment for Modeling" is one of my favorite books of all time! It shows lots of peculiarly indented Forth code.

https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf

>CAM6 Simulator Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck

>Forth source code for CAM-6 hardware:

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt

And a couple more recent videos to music using the SimCity/Micropolis tile set and WebGL tile engine to display cells:

SimCity Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata Chill Resolve 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI

I performed it in real time in response to the music (see the demo below to try it yourself), and there's a particularly vivid excursion that starts here:

https://youtu.be/319i7slXcbI?t=314

The following longer demo starts out with an homage to "Powers of 10", and is focused on SimCity, but shows how you can switch between simulators with different rules and parameters, like setting rings of fire with the heat diffusion cellular automata, then switching to the city simulator to watch it all burn as the fires spread out and leave ashes behind, then switching back to another CA rule to zap it back into another totally different pattern (you can see a trail of destruction left by not-Godzilla at 0:50 while the city simulator is running).

I had to fix some bugs in the original SimCity code so it didn't crash when presented with the arbitrarily scrambled tile arrangements that the CA handed it -- think of it as fuzz testing; due to the sequential groups of 9 tiles for 3x3 zones, and the consecutive arrangements of different zone type and growth states, the smoothing heat diffusion creates all these smeared out concentric rings of zones for the city simulator to animate and simulate, like rings of water, looping animations of fire, permutations of roads and traffic density, rippling smokestacks, spinning radars, burbling fountains, an explosion animation that ends in ash, etc.

Chaim Gingold's "SimCity Reverse Diagrams" visually describes the SimCity tiles, simulator, data models, etc:

https://smalltalkzoo.thechm.org/users/Dan/uploads/SimCityRev...

Micropolis Web Space Inventory Cellular Automata Music 1:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBVyCpmVQew

You can play with it here. Click the "X" in the upper left corner to get rid of the about box, use the space bar to toggle between SimCity and Cellular Automata mode, the letters to switch between cities, + and - switch between tile sets (the original SimCity monochrome tiles are especially nice for cleansing the palette between blasts of psychedelic skittles rainbows, and the medieval theme includes an animated retro lores 8 bit pixel art knight on a horse), the digits to control the speed, and 0 toggles pause. (It's nice to slow down and watch close up, actually!):

https://micropolisweb.com/

As you can see it's really fun to play with to music and cannabis, but if you're going to use any harder stuff I recommend you get used to it first and have a baby sitter with you. Actually the whole point of my working on this for decades is so that you don't need the harder stuff, and you can put it on pause when you mom calls in the middle of your trip and you have to snap back to coherency, and close the tab when you've had enough.

DonHopkins 20 days ago [–]

There's so much about it that I love, but my favorite part of Rudy's CALab demo is the "Office of the Future" and 1-800 number at the end:

https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=2067