Elementary is a viewer for Elementary cellular automaton focusing on simplicity and maintainability. Trying to fill a gap of easy to grasp and use solutions.

Run the simulation in your browser

Install

The simplest way to play with the sample is through Github. Download or clone this repository and make sure that you have npm installed, then go to the root directory (where the package.json lives) and run npm install. This should download typescript and all other dependencies that are needed for the application to build. Open index.html in any evergreen browser and you should be all setup.

Usage

The API is simple - one line of code and one lines of HTML should render the automaton for you.

    new ElementaryApp().run();

HTML

Your HTML needs a marker element deciding where you want things to render. The important part is that the element id is the same as the 'container' specified in your config.

As the config is optional to give the default is 'selection-view'.

    <div id="selection-view"></div>

Config

You can optionally pass a config to Elementary by using the chainable function withConfig(elementaryConfig). Here you control things like generations and style.

{
    width: number;        // Grid width (default 1000)
    cellsize: number;     // The size of a single cell (default 5)
    generations: number;  // Amount of generations to simulate (default 1000)
    container: string     // Marker element where Elementary will generate it's view (default '#elementary-container')
    ratio: boolean;       // If true - Calculate cellsize to fill window width (default true)
    cellcolorOff: string; // color for state off - this should be a color valid in CSS (default 'rgb(132, 208, 212)')
    cellcolorOn: string;  // color for state on - this should be a color valid in CSS (default 'rgb(87, 91, 107)')
};

Words from the author

I always been fascinated by the 'alive' nature presented by automatons and as such i wanted to investigate them further. And voila! Elementary was born.

With that said, the project is still in a very early state and much of it is only a thought in my head at this time. But The image generation does work, so feel free to use it as you like. And if you are just starting out you can probably learn something from it!