WARNING: Cabasa is currently being heavily refactored and redesigned. Due to this not all of the features listed below are currently available. All features will be restored at some future date after the redesign is complete. (Unfortunately I cannot give a specific date; that will be dependent on how much time I get to work on Cabasa.)

Cabasa

Cabasa is an application for the simulation of arbitrary 2D cellular automata (henceforth CA/CAs for clarity). In contrast to other CA simulation applications which only allow a limited set of CAs to be simulated, Cabasa allows allows the simulation of any 2D CA on a rectangular grid.

Features

• Uses the ALPACA language (originally by @cpressey) to create CAs, providing more flexibility than many other CA simulation software
• An interactive user interface based on the widely-used Golly CA simulator allowing patterns to be drawn easily.
• Able to open and save patterns in the MCell file format.

Installation

As of this moment, there are no pre-built binaries to download; you will have to compile Cabasa from source. For more details on how to do this, see BUILDING.md.

FAQs

Q: Are there any downloads?

A: Not yet. This is because Cabasa used to rely on the Haskell programming language to work; if a Haskell package repository is not available, some parts of Cabasa would not work properly. Unfortunately, it is fairly hard to package a repository of this sort with Cabasa. This problem has recently been fixed, but there are still no downloads just yet.

Q: How is this different to Golly/MCell/my favourite CA program?

A: Existing CA programs can only simulate certain built-in types of cellular automata. However, Cabasa aims to support almost any 2D CA.

The upshot of this is: If your desired CA can be simulated with another software, use it! It's likely to be faster and easier to use than Cabasa. However, if you want to try out a completely novel CA, then you should seriously think about using Cabasa.

Q: This is still a very new project. Are you sure people have been frequently asking these questions?

Good observation. But, if I were to see this sort of project, the above would be the questions I would want to ask.

If you have another question, feel free to ask me and I'll add it to this list!