pyCA
====

Stanislaw Ulam was growing crystal patterns on a lattice at Los Alamos in
the 1940s, while John von Neumann hunted for a machine that could build a
copy of itself\ :footcite:`vonneumann1966`; Ulam suggested the lattice, and
the cellular automaton was born. John Conway made the subject a household game
in 1970 when Martin Gardner's column\ :footcite:`gardner1970` unveiled the
Game of Life, and Stephen Wolfram made it a science in the 1980s by
numbering the 256 elementary rules\ :footcite:`wolfram1983` and sorting
their behaviors into classes\ :footcite:`wolfram1984` — frozen, periodic,
chaotic, and the strange fourth class that computes. The lesson of that lineage is the lesson of this library: a rule
you can write on one line can produce a history you cannot compress at all.

pyCA builds those histories and measures them. The automata span the
deterministic elementary rules, an Ising variant where a rule competes with
a heat bath, noisy and asynchronous corruptions of the synchronous clock,
and outer-totalistic two-dimensional rules with Life as the standard-bearer.
The measures — block entropy, entropy rate, mutual information — quantify
how much information a spacetime diagram carries, and where it lives.

If you're new here, start with :doc:`getting_started`, then work through
whichever guide matches your problem. The original 2016 MATLAB classes are
preserved in the repository's ``matlab/`` directory.

Guide
^^^^^

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1

   getting_started
   applet
   guide_eca
   guide_stochastic
   guide_life
   guide_measures

Reference
^^^^^^^^^

.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 2

   api/pyCA
   license

Citing
^^^^^^

Sowinski DR. *pyCA* [computer software]. Version 0.1.0. 2016. Accessed July 21, 2026. https://github.com/EternalTime/CellularAutomata

.. code-block:: bibtex

   @software{sowinski_pyca,
     author  = {Sowinski, Damian R.},
     title   = {pyCA: Cellular automata simulations and information measures},
     year    = {2016},
     version = {0.1.0},
     url     = {https://github.com/EternalTime/CellularAutomata}
   }

Indices and tables
==================

* :ref:`genindex`
* :ref:`modindex`
* :ref:`search`

References
^^^^^^^^^^

.. footbibliography::