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Introduction

CAPOW (Cellular Automata for Electric Power simulation) is a research project of Rudy Rucker's which was born under the CAMCOS program at San Jose State University. Since 1994 CAPOW has been exploring new kinds of continuous-valued cellular automata.

With funding from EPRI from 1994-1998, Rucker and his students devloped Capow 98, a flexible and easily programmable Windows application for simulating and analyzing one-dimensional and two-dimensional cellular automata. The targeted purpose was to produce visualizations of electricital wave forms. You can get an idea of the scope of the program by viewing a version of the help file online.

Rucker revised CAPOW for use in his 2005 book, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, and still tweaks it from time to time, most recently for an article in the November, 2007 issue of Make magazine.

"Continuous-Valued Cellular Automata for Non-Linear Wave Equations," by Daniel Ostrov and Rudy Rucker, Complex Systems 10, published Fall 97.
This paper explains the mathematics of why the CAPOW software can be used to simulate such physical phenomena as heat, wave motion, oscillation, and non-linear waves. The paper also discusses how a famous early computer experiment by Enrico Fermi and Stanislaw Ulam can be replicated using CAPOW.

"Continuous-Valued Cellular Automata in Two Dimensions" , by Rudy Rucker.
A paper based on a talk given at the "Constructive CA" workshop at the Santa Fe Institute, November 16, 1998. This paper describes some of the new CA rules added for Release 6.3 of CAPOW. The new rules include two-dimensional reaction-diffusion rules, also known as activator-inhibitor rules. This paper appeared in New Constructions in Cellular Automata (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Proceedings), edited by David Griffeath and Cristopher Moore , Oxford University Press 2003.

What are cellular automata (CAs)?
What do CAs have to do with electric power?
What is CAMCOS?
What's new in Capow?
How do I download the program?
Who were the participants in the project?

Features of Capow

Discrete and continuous cellular automata. CAs provide physically accurate finite difference method style models of heat, wave motion, oscillation, non-linear waves and reaction-diffusion.
Autorandomize and screensaver modes for easy and casual visual education about cellular automata simulations.
1D CAs can be viewed as color spacetime diagrams or as changing graphs.
2D CAs can be viewed as flat color displays or as 3D surfaces in a Virtual Reality interface with anaglyphic 3-D glasses.
Complete file save and loading abilities. File formats supported include proprietary *.CA and *.CAS formats as well as *.DLL and VRML. Program supports copy to Windows clipboard for pasting images into other applications.
Comprehensive user interface with modeless dialogs useable as realtime control panels. Dialogs and key commands accessible via toolbar buttons. Dialogs can affect color display, CA parameters, type of view, 3D view details, automatic randomization, generators, etc.
Interactive seeding and cursor "touch" feature.
Ability to place generators with specified frequency, amplitude, position, and phase. Generator cursor tool allows user to do this interactively in both 1D and 2D rules.
A graph-view mode in which the user can select a sample point in a 1-D CA and track the charge or the current at this point as a time-series.
A dialog to perform instant Fourier Analysis of the component waves and the power spectrum of the time series at a user-selected sample point in the graph-view mode.
Automated "breeding" features for evolution of CA behaviors towards specified entropies.
Ability for users to write DLL rules for CAs.

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