Cellular Automata & Neural Nets in Basic

simple implementations of some famous algorithms

Instead of providing elucidative comments myself, I choose to accompany these QBasic / FreeBasic sources with a few selected links where inquisitive readers will find all the necessary information.

Dijkstra.bas

Edsger Dijkstra's 1959 pathfinding algorithm:
compute shortest paths on a grid map, sample graphs are included.

notes from a Data Structures course (John Morris, 1998)
pathfinding aimed at game coders (Chris Palmer, 1998)

CellAuto.bas

Displays the dynamics of over 3.2·10^616 1-D cellular automata: order for free.

CA tutorial (Alexander Schatten, 1999)
cellular automata FAQ (Tim Tyler, 2002)

Though many state diagrams of the elementary one-dimensional (k=2, r=1.5) CA look rather dull, judicious sampling will reveal their substantial sonic potential.
The particular real time CA-to-midi mapping applied here, is straightforward and intuitive, generating a remarkable range of sturdy rhythms and bouncing motifs from these quietly swopping cells.

CApieces.bas

Linear CA midi ensemble (bass, cello and two wind): reveals what the eye can't grasp.

CA in midi based computer music (Burraston et al., 2003)
algorithmic musical composition (Hanna Järveläinen, 2000)

Fredkin.bas

Edward Fredkin's classic 1962 parity rule: a replicator CA kaleidoscope.

origins of CA digital mechanics models (Ed Fredkin, 2001)
CA history: the classical era (Rudy Rucker, 1989)

GoLife.bas

John Conway's Game of Life: reads lifepatterns in interactive file GoLife.lif

the article that started it all (Martin Gardner, 1970)
definitions of Life terms (Mark D. Niemiec, 1998)

Purplrug.bas

Rudy Rucker's Laplacian rug rule: purple hazed bubbling lava.

analogish rules at the CelLab site (Rudy Rucker, 1989)
more on the rug rule (Rudy Rucker, 1989)

FPUwaves.bas

Continuous-valued CA: the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam quadratic nonlinear wave model.

the original Los Alamos report (Fermi/Pasta/Ulam, 1955)
documentation for the CAPOW project (Ostrov/Rucker, 1997)

The next program feeds the CA with sound waves and dumps the updates in a standard .wav file. What happens if a single string must bear the weight of a full chord? The CA being second order accurate only, tremulous little tinkling tones soon ripple the initial signal.
This one was real fun to write. Besides the CA kernel, it contains a barebones three-operator FM-synthesizer and a routine for making diatonic chords. It can mindlessly churn out an endless dominant progression, as well as produce totally insane random noise.

CAsounds.bas

Continuous-valued CA model of a complex vibrating string, one for each channel.

FDA of the ideal string (Julius O. Smith III, 2005)
an introduction to FM (Bill Schottstaedt, 2000)

CycleCel.bas

David Griffeath's cyclic cellular automata: wave activity in the primordial soup.

chef's java cca applet (David Griffeath, 2000)
cca rules at the MCell site (Mirek Wójtowicz, 2001)

Hopfield.bas

Auto-associative memory, John Hopfield's 1982 discrete recurrent network:
a toy engine for pattern recall.

at the generation5 AI-site (James Matthews, 1999)
at the BrainWave model repository (Simon Dennis, 1997)

Kohonen.bas

Teuvo Kohonen's 1982 self organizing feature map:
a toy engine for 2-D color clustering.

notes from the inventor himself (Teuvo Kohonen, 1999)
an interactive tutorial (Tom Germano, 1999)

Som2opt.bas

Self organizing feature map improved with 2-opt:
an approximate solver for the traveling salesman problem.

presenting the som-2opt hybrid algorithm (Lucasz Brocki, 2006)
TSPLIB documentation (Gerhard Reinelt, 1995)

BackProp.bas

The 1986 Rumelhart, Hinton and Williams backpropagation algorithm:
a toy classifier for capital letters.

BrainWave model repository (Devin McAuley, 1997)
formal derivation of the algorithm (Anand Venkataraman, 1999)

overview: Types of neural nets (Jochen Fröhlich, 1997)
deutsch: Einführung in Neuronale Netze (Wolfram-M. Lippe, 2000)
huge: FAQ of the Usenet neural-nets newsgroup (Warren S. Sarle, 2002)

Node Download (617 kB, includes input files & executables)

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