What this is about
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+ MicroWorld is a rule driven cellular automaton. What does that mean? Well, it's a two dimensional world made up of squares called cells. The world develops in steps, and at each step, each cell is modified by applying the rules.
Go and watch it running for a few moments, then come back here.
The demonstration world is a mountain, with snow at the top and the sea at the bottom. as you watched, you probably saw the bright green of grass on the lower slopes of the mountain turn to the darker green of forest. You may have seen some forest fires break out.
+That's all controlled by rules. You make the rules. To start Noah's flood, go to the rules page now, and add this rule at the very top:
++ if altitude is less than 200 then state should be water ++
then, go and watch the world again. What happens? You should see water spread across everywhere except the very top of the mountain. But after the flood, the waters should drain away again. Go back to rules and add this rule at the very top:
++ if altitude is more than 9 and state is water then state should be grassland ++
Now the world alternates between new and grassland. That's no good! Go back to rules and delete the rule that you first added - the one that says
++ if altitude is less than 200 then state should be water ++
And see! The world starts growing again.
+What you can do next
+Change some rules
+Change some of the other rules and see what happens. Very likely, one of the first things that will happen is that you will get a message like this:
++ I did not understand 'if state is grassland then 1 chance in 10 state will be heath' ++
That means that you changed a rule in a way that the engine could no longer understand it. To find out what the engine will understand, have a look at the documentation.
+Invent some rules of your own!
+What happens when people come into the world? Where would they make their first camp? Would they want to be near the water, so they could fish? Would they want to be near fertile grassland, to graze their sheep and cattle?
+Write a rule which adds some camps to the world
+What happens to the land around a camp? Do the people burn down forest to make new grassland? Do they convert the grassland into meadow, or into crop?
+Does growing crops reduce the soil fertility? What makes people decide that their camp is a good enough place to build a proper house?
+Write some rules which describe this
+How many squares of meadow or crop does it take to feed each house full of people? What happens when there are too many houses and not enough fields? Can houses catch fire? What happens to a house which is next to a fire?
+How many houses do you need for a market place? Where would people build a harbour?
+Change the rules completely
+I've provided rules which use the MicroWorld cellular automaton to make a simple model of the changes to land in Europe after the ice age. But you don't have to use it like that, at all.
+Conway's Game of Life is one of the famous uses of a cellular automaton. The rules for the Game of Life are very simple. To set up your game of life you'll need some initialisation rules, one for every cell you want to start live (we'll use black for live, and white for dead):
++ if x is equal to 4 and y is equal to 4 and state is new then state should be black+
Add as many of these as you need for your starting pattern. Then add a rule, after all those:
++ if state is new then state should be white ++
I'll leave you to work out what the rules of life are for yourself, from the Wiki page I linked to.
+CHEAT You'll find other rule sets you can explore if you go to the Parameters page.
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