Important Notes about EvoCA =========================== EvoCA runs on a CA platform called CAMELot, which was developed by members of the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Center working on the COLOMBO project (sponsored by the ESPRIT-IV programme of the European Commission). Unfortunately, CAMELot is not freely available at present, although you may be able to get a copy if you ask nicely (but I can't make any promises - the COLOMBO project is nothing to do with me). For more details, look at: http://www.epcc.ed.ac.uk/~colombo/ CAMELot also requires that LAM is installed on your system, for running parallel processes (even if you only intend to run it on a single machine). The source code provided (evocab_life_xxx.cpt) is basically C code with a few changes which get preprocessed by CAMELot. You should therefore be able to inspect the code and figure out what's going on even if you cannot actually compile and run it. The seed for the random number generator is set in the function initialiseCell. In the supplied version, this gets set to 1033730079. When run with this seed, self-stabilising dynamics appear in the CA after about 10000 iterations. Comment-out this line and un-comment the preceeding line to allow the seed to be set to a different value each time the program is run. If you *have* managed to get both CAMELot and LAM installed, you should be able to compile and run the code. Here's how: How to run Evoca: 1. Start LAM with "lamboot -v lamboothosts" (where lamboothosts is a text file containing the names of the machines on which you wish to run CAMELot in parallel, listed one machine per line) 2. Start CAMELot with "./camelot &" 3. Load configuration (.cnf) file with File->Load configuration... (you will probably have to change the supplied configuration to suit your own system. First load the config file, then do steps 4 and 5 below, then change the config settings via Configure->C compiler command line... & Configure->MPI run command...) 4. Load source (.cpt) file with File->Open... 5. Press Compile button (wait for success message) 6. Press Build button (wait for success message) 7. Press Run button to bring up Run dialog:- a. press Visualise to see what's happening (visualisation step of 1 should work fine, then select substate "life" to see CA states) b. press Loop to iterate through CA updates indefinitely (until Pause is pressed) c. press Go to iterate through a fixed number of updates then stop again (to change number of updates, use Setup->Set number of steps..) 8. When finished, close CAMELot and shut down LAM with "lamhalt" Good luck! This program is supplied "as is". I will do my best to answer any queries, but I cannot make any guarantees about the level of support I can provide. Tim Taylor Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour School of Informatics University of Edinburgh tim.taylor@ed.ac.uk http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/timt/ 27 April 2004