Rudy Rucker's CAPOW Project

Although the program illustrates scientific notions, the real purpose of it is for play. You create and watch gnarly edge-of-chaos lava-lamp-like realtime tweakable light-shows, based on 1D and 2D continuous valued celluar automata modelled on linear and nonlinear wave equations, on reaction-diffusion rules, and on user programmable rules.

The project's start was funded by Electric Power Research Institute EPRI. From 1994-1998, Rudy Rucker and his Computer Science students at San Jose State University devloped Capow, a flexible and easily programmable Windows application for simulating and analyzing one-dimensional and two-dimensional cellular automata or CAs. The initially targeted purpose was to produce CA visualizations of electricital wave forms and of city or state-wide power outages. In time, the project became a general investigation of 2D continuous-valued CAs---and an ever-changing source of fun. You can get an idea of the scope of the program by viewing the Capow help file.

Rucker revised Capow for use in his 2005 book, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, republished in 2016, and now readable online. Rucker also used CAPOW to make the page borders for his online science-fiction magazine Flurb.

"Continuous-Valued Cellular Automata in Two Dimensions" , by Rudy Rucker.
A paper based on a talk given at the "Constructive CA" workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, November 16, 1998. This paper describes some of the new CA rules added for Release 6.3 of CAPOW. The new rules include two-dimensional reaction-diffusion rules, also known as activator-inhibitor rules. This paper appeared in New Constructions in Cellular Automata (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings), edited by David Griffeath and Cristopher Moore , Oxford University Press 2003.

A History of Cellular Automata From Rudy Rucker's manual for the downloadable Cellab or CA Lab program for 2D digital CA.

Discrete and continuous cellular automata.
CAs provide physically accurate models of heat, wave motion, oscillation, non-linear waves and reaction-diffusion.
Autorandomizemodes for easy exploration.
2D CAs can be viewed as flat color displays or as 3D surfacess.
Complete file save and loading abilities. File formats supported include proprietary *.CA and *.CAS formats.
Program supports copy to Windows clipboard for pasting images into other applications.
Comprehensive user interface with modeless dialogs useable as realtime control panels.
Dialogs can affect color display, CA parameters, type of view, 3D view details, automatic randomization, generators, etc.
Interactive seeding and cursor "touch" feature.
Ability to place generators with specified frequency, amplitude, position, and phase. Generator cursor tool works in 1D and 2D rules.
A graph-view mode in which the user can select a sample point in a 1-D CA and track the charge or the current at this point as a time-series.
A dialog to perform instant Fourier Analysis of the component waves and the power spectrum of the time series at a user-selected sample point in the graph-view mode.
Automated "breeding" features for evolution of digital CA behaviors towards specified entropies.
Ability for users to write DLL rules for CAs.

	1994	1995	1996	1997
Spring	Alan Borecky Andrew Chu Howard Lin Charles Miller	David Kent Juyoung Lee Tuyen Ly Ping-Chak Wong	Darrel Cherry John Briere Bang Nguyen Thai Truong Juliekara Techasaratoole Rajaneekara Techasaratoole	Michael Ling Andrew Forster Loc Ho Lorrie Tanabe
Fall	Juyoung Lee Tuyen Ly Bob Westergaard	Jerry Chang Ning Tian	Chi Pan Lao Otto Leung Darin Levy James Kroutch Siu Ming Tong	Andrew Forster Michael Ling Rong Liu Ted Colbert

CAPOW: Continuous Valued Cellular Automata.

An art and research project by Rudy Rucker and friends.