I'm trying to create a large ecosystem simulator (linky). Animals will probably be free roaming agents while the ground, water, atmosphere, and plants are represented by different cellular autonoma grids. Basically the heightmap is one CA, dirt quality another, air currents another, etc. Since it's at heart an ecosystem, things need to be as large as possible to allow for population sizes to be large enough to allow for stable population dynamcis. Assuming that I pick a resolution of 1 square meter for each CA cell, and assuming that any global interactions (erosion, etc.) are done with local information only (like a guassian blur), what is a realistic max for the dimensions of my world? Most global interactions don't need to be performed more than once every few seconds, so my gut instinct is that the CA isn't going to be CPU limited as much as RAM limited. I'm thinking that most CA layers are maybe 1 or 2 bytes per cell. I'll probably have maybe 20 or 30 layers, so that's something like 40 or 50 bytes for each grid cell. Having to page from Virtual Memory might be the kiss of death for something like this, but I'm not sure. I'm thinking on a reasonable computer (512 megs ram, 2Ghz processor) you could probably max out at a 3000 x 3000 sized CA with the properties I outlined above. Just looking for people's thoughts and/or experience working with Cellular Autonoma. What's the realistic ceiling for something like this?

You may want to look at the theory behind "hashlife", and implementation of The Game Of Life,
where in you can make an infinatly extensible field where self-similarity is used to keep both compute and memory usage down.

Quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
...By using sparse arrays for the more complex data and minimizing the grid cell data ypu will be able to have a much larger map at a cost of a bit more CPU processing (to identify adjacents).

Im doing something like this on a simulation project -- I have heavy weight AI
as a target, so the 'significant' objects each often have many thousands of times the data of one map cell.

That's more or less what I was thinking. Nice to know the same conclusion has been reached by another person independantly.

Quote:
Bitmapping data is your friend. If you can use a bit or two instead of a byte for many of the factors (and group all the cell factors into one record/struct to maximize the potential compression -- and turn off packing...)
you could save alot of space (assuming you werent already planning to do this...)

I was thinking along these lines, but most of my data needs at least a full byte to represent an appropriate number of values to give the diversity I'd like. Either way, I'm aware of bitmapping, so I'll keep it in mind as I work on this.

Thanks for the thoughts everyone.