Cellular Automaton in Mathematica and OOP
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg21895] Cellular Automaton in Mathematica and OOP
- From: "Johannes Ludsteck" <ludsteck at zew.de>
- Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2000 22:54:54 -0500 (EST)
- Organization: Zentr. f. Europ. Wirtschaftsforsch
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Dear mathgroup members. Some days ago someone asked whether is is sensible to program a complex cellular automaton in Mathematica. I started programming a simple cellular automaton in Smalltalk (Dolphin Smalltalk 2.1, it's free!) and made the following three observations: 1) You can create a much more intuitive simulation language in OOP. The pattern matching strategy in Mathematica may be elegant, but the resulting code is not very readable. (See for example the walk-rules in the book of Gaylord & D'andria). 2) The Smalltalk code is five times faster in my simple application. This may be an important advantage if the automaton is very complex. 3) Smalltalk provides no visualization tools. Since Mathematica provides an rich toolbox of visualization tools, it seems to be sensible to run the simulation in Smalltalk and to export them to Mathematica in order to visualize them. I hope, the answer is not to late Best regards, Johannes Ludsteck Johannes Ludsteck Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) Department of Labour Economics, Human Resources and Social Policy Phone (+49)(0)621/1235-157 Fax (+49)(0)621/1235-225 P.O.Box 103443 D-68034 Mannheim GERMANY Email: ludsteck at zew.de