Home

Celeste CA -- A tiny cellular automaton simulator

Welcome to the CelesteCA website. Celeste is a very simple CA simulator originally written to run Conway's Game of Life.

You can play with the source code and implement your own rule sets (alternatives to the Game of Life) or simply try to invent new input configurations for the existing rules that do funny stuff.

The input files are very simple and can be edited with a text editor. For each step in the simulation, an image is written to the simulation directory. You can turn them into a movie or animated GIF file using your favourite UNIX tools. ;)

This version was inspired by Edward Martin's Game of Lifewebsite. He has a cool Java applet and the Life Lexikon, go check it out. Celeste can also read the .cells format, btw.

Last but not least, Celeste is released under the extremely permisse WTFPL. The full license is shown below:

 DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                    Version 2, December 2004

 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net>

 Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
 copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
 as the name is changed.

            DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
   TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

  0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO. 

The source code is included in the zip you can download above. You can also get it from the SVN:

svn checkout svn://svn.code.sf.net/p/celesteca/code/trunk celesteca-code

Example usage: if you want to run 50 iterations with the default GAME_OF_LIFE ruleset and use the initial state from the .cells-format file 'acorn.cells', try this command line:

java -jar celeste.jar -c acorn.cells -i 50

To see all options or get help with Celeste simply run it without any parameters.

Enjoy.