Guy Tel-Zur's Blog

My post on Cellular Automata from January 12 was not put there by mistake. I want to use it as a starting point for a couple of exercises in my Parallel Processing course. In that post I gave a few drawings that differ only by the generating rule number. Today, I am going to show how using the Condor High-Throughput Computing system allows to handle in a very simple way large volume of computations. I used this simple Condor submit file : universe = vanilla executable = nks.py Error = err.$(Process) Output= out.$(Process) Log = log.$(Process) Arguments = $(Process) Queue 256 And was able to compute the whole set of 256 rules (jobs) with the same effort of computing a single rule. I submitted the task to my Personal Condor on my laptop and was not disappointed; After a while I got all the outputs happily waiting for post processing.

I recently bought Stephen Wolfram 's book " New Kind of Science ". The book is interesting and I highly recommend it. In the spirit of one of my favorite phrases by Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand" I decided to reproduce some of the first examples that are given in the book. I wrote about 100 lines of Python code and enjoyed the beauty of the results. The whole book is available online and I am referring here to the plots on page 55 . Below enclosed a few of my plots. Rule 25: Rule 22: Rule 30: Rule 60: Rule 73: It is still a mystery for me the richness of the patterns that are produced from very simple interaction rules. I would call it Social Networking by pixels .