luacells

A Rust text-based cellular automata simulator that uses Lua for rule definitions.

Installation

With cargo:

bash cargo install luacells

Usage

bash luacells rules/life.lua luacells --help # For more information

You can find the controls at the bottom of the viewer.

Rule format

Rules are given as lua programs with three globals: Update, Display, and States.

Example (Conway's Game of Life):

```lua Update = function(c, n) local sum = 0 for _, v in ipairs(n) do sum = sum + v end if c == 0 then if sum == 3 then return 1 else return 0 end else if sum == 2 or sum == 3 then return 1 else return 0 end end end

Display = function(n) if n == 0 then return " " end if n == 1 then return "()" end end

States = 2 ```

States

States is simply the number of states a cell can be in.

Update

Update is a function describing how to update a cell.

It is given two arguments:

1. The previous state of that cell
2. The previous states in the square neighborhood around the cell

The neighborhood is given as a table in this order:

1. North
2. South
3. East
4. West
5. Northeast
6. Southeast
7. Northwest
8. Southwest

Display

Display is the function that displays a cell.

It is given the value of the cell and should return a string of length 1 or 2.

Randomize

You can optionally add Randomize = true to the rule file to randomize on startup.

Pattern format

The patterns are just lists of rows of numbers.

The rows are delemited by semicolons, and the cells are delemited by commas.

This repository

This repository contains the Rust source code along with some rules and patterns, in the rules and patterns directories.