Early dedicated machines for Life and other C-A?
Eric Smith
From late 1973 to early 1974, John List designed and built a Life
machine, with a 64x64 universe displayed on a television. It could
compute up to 30 generations per second. There are some photos of
the machine here:
http://gallery.brouhaha.com/v/computer/jllist_life/
In roughly the same timeframe, Kreg Martin, then a high school
student, designed and built a similar life machine as a science fair
project, and won several national awards. Two brief articles appeared
in the San Jose Mercury News in May and August 1974:
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ca/life/martin/
What other early dedicated cellular automata machines were there?
Eric Smith
Frank Buss
> What other early dedicated cellular automata machines were there?
Looks like the powerful CAM-8 was designed in 1993:
http://timtyler.freeshell.org/ca/threads/1993/0283.html
Maybe a CAM-1 was designed earlier :-)
--
Frank Buss, f...@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
Ilmari Karonen
> Eric Smith wrote:
>
>> What other early dedicated cellular automata machines were there?
>
> Looks like the powerful CAM-8 was designed in 1993:
>
> http://timtyler.freeshell.org/ca/threads/1993/0283.html
>
> Maybe a CAM-1 was designed earlier :-)
CAM-6 is described in the book _Cellular Automata Machines_ by Toffoli
and Margolus (The MIT Press, 1987; ISBN 0-262-20060-0). If you're
interested in this topic, I'd highly recommend trying to find a copy.
The book also mentions an article describing CAM-5 from 1984 (Toffoli
& Tommaso: "CAM: A high-performance cellular-automaton machine",
Physica 10 D, 1984, pp. 195-204; doi:10.1016/0167-2789(84)90261-6).
The DOI should lead to a fulltext PDF if you have a ScienceDirect
subscription, but I couldn't make it work right now: all I get is a
message saying "We cannot process your request at this time."
--
Ilmari Karonen
To reply by e-mail, please replace ".invalid" with ".net" in address.
Ilmari Karonen
>
> The book also mentions an article describing CAM-5 from 1984 (Toffoli
> & Tommaso: "CAM: A high-performance cellular-automaton machine",
> Physica 10 D, 1984, pp. 195-204; doi:10.1016/0167-2789(84)90261-6).
> The DOI should lead to a fulltext PDF if you have a ScienceDirect
> subscription, but I couldn't make it work right now: all I get is a
> message saying "We cannot process your request at this time."
Following up to my own post: I stopped by at the library and managed
to locate the article. It has a footnote that reads: "* CAM was
conceived and developed by Tommaso Toffoli in 1981, initially as a
personal project and on spare time and resources. One version (CAM
1.2) was built in the context of ongoing MIT research, and partially
supported by it."
It also mentions some similar but more specialized machines, such as
one built at the Delft University of Technology to simulate Ising spin
systems. This machine seems to be the same one as the subject of Arne
Hoogland's Ph.D. thesis, which is available online at <URL:
http://repository.tudelft.nl/file/764556/375417 >.