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Welcome to zasim

zasim is a python package for simulating and developing cellular automatons.

Its current features are:

  • Reduction of boilerplate code and modularisation of cellular automaton step functions using the cagen module for Python and C++ code. This allows running a synchronous automaton asynchronously without any change to the particular computation code.
  • A GUI that’s compatible with interactive usage through IPythons console, qtconsole and notebook web application.
  • Display configurations in one or two dimensions.
  • Show different types of histograms.
  • Manipulate cellular space through external programs, such as The Gimp, text editors like Vim and Emacs or using the full range of numpy from an interactive console.
  • An interactive tutorial for use with the IPython notebook.
  • A couple of examples with a walkthrough guiding the user through each.

Features that are currently in development in different branches are:

  • Define cells as composed of multiple subcells (numpy-records branch)
  • Turn any synchronous cellular automaton into an asynchronous automaton that still does the same computation.

Examples

Have a look at the Example Gallery for a few interesting things zasim can do.

Getting the code

The zasim code can be found on github. Additionally, this documentation is built with “view source” links for the files.

Understanding Zasim

There is an overview document, that will explain the most common concepts of zasim.

Interactive Tutorial

If you install the ipython notebook and its dependencies, you can run either of the following commands

zasim_tutorial

python -m zasim.examples.notebooks.notebook_app

ipython notebook --notebook-dir=zasim/examples/notebooks/notebooks/

to start zasim’s interactive tutorial in a web browser.

Running zasim

Until using zasim in an interactive interpreter gets more convenient, you can use the gui or cagen packages from the commandline. Both offer a commandline argument interface with many different options. You can get a usage summary with the following commands:

zasim_cli --help

zasim_gui --help

You can find info on how to start the gui from the commandline and how to start the commandline version with complete usage summaries. There is also a section in the tutorial about how to run the commandline version.

Environment variables

zasim honors a few different environment variables during runtime:

ZASIM_PY_DEBUG
Set this to “yes” to write out generated pure-python code path and filename when a StepFunc is generated, to “extreme” to create a print statement for every assignment in the python code. You can also set it to “pdb” or “pudb” to start a pdb or pudb when a StepFunc is stepped.
ZASIM_WEAVE_DEBUG
Set this to “yes” to compile the C code with -O0 or to “gdb” to launch a gdb in “x-terminal-emulator” and have a trap signal be emitted every time a step is started.
ZASIM_QT
Set this to “pyside” to use pyside or anything else to not use Qt at all.

See also

Debugging cagen stepfuncs goes deeper into how to use these environment variables to debug step functions.

API Documentation

Indices and tables

Table Of Contents

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