Everyone knows the classic example of cellular automata, Conway’s Game of Life. Instead of rehashing an implementation of that, I wanted to build something just a little bit different while learning the Nim language.
I decided to implement another type of cellular automata, Wireworld, first conceived by Brian Silverman in 1987. The code for this could easily be modified to produce Conway’s Game of Life by adjusting the `State` type and the `process(world: ref World)` procedure.
Build the project from source by typing nim c display.nim into your terminal.
Run the project by calling ./display in the appropriate directory.
This automata simulates a simple abstraction of electricity.
It has four states:
- Ground
- Wire
- Electron head
- Electron tail
The propagation rules are:
- Ground -> Ground
- Electron head -> Electron tail
- Electron tail -> Wire
- If Wire has exactly 1 or 2 neighbors == Electron Head:
- Wire -> Electron Head
- Otherwise:
- Wire -> Wire
This implementation is built in Nim using the SDL 2 library.
Clicking on the map changes the tile under the cursor to the current drawmode’s type.
There are four drawing modes, one for each state:
A: Ground modeS: Wire modeD: Electron head modeF: Electron tail mode
In addition there are a few other keybindings:
Q: Quit WireworldR: Clear the current worldP: Pause or Play the simulation (can draw while paused or playing)
- [ ] Undo
- [ ] Save and load worlds from file
- [ ] Increase and decrease speed of simulation