 This is the first block of the workshop series GMU:Self-Organisation by Design

Computational Systems

Theory

Self-Organizing Systems usually have two components:

Spacial Environment (i.e. Cellular Automaton or Vector field)
Large number of Mobile Units (i.e. Particles or Agents)

In this workshop we will lear how to model those components in Processing, and how interactions between them can give rise to self-organizing behaviour.

Topics

Simple Cellular Automata (CA)
- Discrete and Continuous CA
- CA on regular grids
- CA on irregular grids

Multi-Level Cellular Automata
- Multilevel, Multiscale CA
- CA as Neural Networks
- Turing-McCabe Patterns

Particle Systems
- Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA)
- Particle Physics

Vector Fields
- Particles in static vector fields
- Particles in dynamic vector fields

Software

Some of the systems we are going to explore in Processing are readily available in other software suites.
We will have a look at them and learn how to implement these systems from scratch.

Netlogo (Alife Environment)
Golly (Game of Life Simulator)
Ready (Reaction-Diffusion Systems)

Links

New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
Cellular Automata in Shiffman's Nature of Code
Particle Systems in Shiffman's Nature of Code

Experiments

This section will contain links to subpages and experiments of the participants.

Literature

A list of books and articles that are relevant to this part of the workshop will be published here.