Snowflake in MGS



Principles

The animated picture below visualizes the first evolution steps of a cellular automata on an hexagonal grid. This cellular automaton idealizes the formation of a snowflake (cf. "A new kind of science", S. Wolfram, pp. 369). Black cells represent region of solid and white cells represent regions of liquid or gaz. The molecules in a snowflake lie on a simple hexagonal grid. Whenever a piece of ice is added to the snowflake, a little heat is released which then tends to inhibit the addition of further pieces of ice nearby. The corresponding evolution rule is very simple: a cell becomes black whenever exactly one of its neighbors was black the step before.
It is very simple to define an hexagonal grids in MGS: an hexagonal grids correpond to a GBF (a group indexed data-structure). The underlying group is (a, b, c; a+b=c) and this presentation is directly used in MGS to defines the underlying lattice.

growth of a snowflake in an hexagonal grid using MGS.
a natural crystal of ice

The corresponding MGS program


gbf hexa = <a,b,c;a+b=c> ;;
Definition of a GBF type. GBF means Group Based Fields. A GBF specifies a uniform topology where the element are indexed by a mathematical group. Here, all elements in an instance of the GBF  type hexa have three neighbors: one following the direction a, the other following the direction b and c. (and also three others neighbors reached following the inverse directions).

This is juste the way in MGS to define an hexagonal grid whose axis are named a, b and c.
trans T =
   (0 as x / (neighborsfold((\a,b.a+b), 0, x)==1)
    => 1);;

The transformation consists in only one rule: a 0 is turned into a 1 if there is only one neighbors with state 1.



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Pages started: May 2002. Last revision: 24 jully 2003.

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