cellular automata

[michel paul]

I've recently been wondering about starting off the next school year (high school) with cellular automata. It seems like this would be a great way to immediately introduce lots of important math and computational ideas visually. These days you can enter something like 'rule 30' into WolframAlpha, and you can google lots of interactive boards for Conway's Game of Life, so it has become something that would be easy to demonstrate in class and easy for kids to access outside of class. Just a little while ago this would have been difficult to approach at a high school level, probably only in a CS class, but now anyone with internet access can get a great introduction to the subject.

Is there a good way to study CA using Sage that would be manageable by a high school student using a *.sagenb account?

This is something new for me. I've heard of CAs over the years of course, like the Game of Life, but I never understood their significance. That's starting to change. As I've been looking into this, I'm amazed. Lots of great history going back to the roots of computation. Does anyone have ideas about this? This would be for kids who have passed Algebra 2.

Thanks very much,

-- Michel

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"What I cannot create, I do not understand."

- Richard Feynman

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"Computer science is the new mathematics."

- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou
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[kcrisman]

On Jul 30, 3:12 pm, michel paul <pythonic.m...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've recently been wondering about starting off the next school year (high
> school) with cellular automata. It seems like this would be a great way to
> immediately introduce lots of important math and computational ideas
> visually. These days you can enter something like 'rule 30' into
> WolframAlpha, and you can google lots of interactive boards for Conway's
> Game of Life, so it has become something that would be easy to demonstrate
> in class and easy for kids to access outside of class. Just a little while
> ago this would have been difficult to approach at a high school level,
> probably only in a CS class, but now anyone with internet access can get a
> great introduction to the subject.
>
> Is there a good way to study CA using Sage that would be manageable by a
> high school student using a *.sagenb account?

Try sage.interacts.fractals.cellular_automaton and see
http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/misc#Cellular_Automata

[michel paul]

Perfect! Thanks.

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[Andrea Lazzarotto]

2012/7/30 kcrisman <kcri...@gmail.com>

Try sage.interacts.fractals.cellular_automaton and see
http://wiki.sagemath.org/interact/misc#Cellular_Automata

That's very interesting! :) In summer I want to introduce some high school students to Sage, the example with cellular automata looks very promising.

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Andrea Lazzarotto - http://andrealazzarotto.com