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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


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