Cellular automata demonstration
Cellular Automata have long attracted attention from researchers as they provide an excellent example of how a set of very low intelligence cells, when allowed to interact, can create interesting emergent results.
This demo is a very simple implementation of Von Neumann's Cellular Automata experiments, in which each cell is able to look at the three neighbours above it, giving it 8 possible scenarios in which it may choose to either switch itself on or off. There are 256 different rule sets possible, based on this simple binary example ( cellular automata experiments have been conducted in far more complicated n-dimensional spaces), and this Java implementation can display all of them.
The demo code can be adapted easily to adopt different strategies and different neighbour interactions to produce different results.
Download Java Cellular Automata Demo
The source code, along with compiled classes, JavaDoc and the compiled JAR file are available here:
Run Java Cellular Automata as an Applet
Note that the code has been compiled using JDK 1.5, so you'll need Java 1.5 or higher for it to run on your computer.