Cellsprings Help: Program Introduction

Cellsprings is a Java 2D cellular automaton explorer, compatible at the JDK 1.1 level. (If you don't know what a CA is, please see the Web-based Resources page. Or you can just wing it and have fun anyway.) While general in its basic functionality, Cellsprings' special focus is on the generative capacity of simple CAs. Hence I refer to it as an "emergetarium". As such, Cellsprings caters to CAs that make the most of minimal starting conditions. Here 'minimal' refers to the effort involved in specifying the initial state or seed, and 'making the most' refers to...welll, if you don't know already you'll soon see. In practice the seeds we favor are either random or simple, and are best contrasted with engineered seeds of the sort historically popular among Conway's Life enthusiasts. (Someone may complain that a given "random" state is actually hard to specify, but the trick is that any of a large class of such states will do.)

Now, we're not knocking the engineering approach, and it's mandatory that you check out the great applets by Wójtowicz and Hensel that are better suited to it, but for itself Cellsprings is mainly interested in seeing what happens when human micromanagement is kept to a minimum. Here we live for the unexpected. If you already know what will happen, why stick around to watch? Fortunately for us, CAs continue to surprise, even, or especially, when we think we've seen it all.

Cellsprings comes in two flavors, an applet and a desktop program. The reference installation of Cellsprings/Web, the applet, is on Isle Ex, my website. While the applet edition can also be run offline, it has full functionality only if it is run from my website, because it interacts with the server file system via some specialized CGI scripts I wrote for the purpose. Cellsprings/DT, the desktop edition, is a full Java application, and can be run anywhere a compatible Java runtime environment is installed. As an application it can access the local file system like a native program, and can also load user-written rulespace Java classes I call springlets.