Cool, and I love the retro font. I had a Vic-20 (early 80s) and Commodore PET 2001 (1977) I am learning Odin, and I was going to try creating live coding environment with scripting in Forth and with the gui and rest in Odin, but for audio and graphics. I was inspired long ago by Paul Batchelor's Sporth and Tidal (now tidal cycles?). Forth is a great language. You can make an compiler/interpreter in a few days. John Earnest's ok.js is also cool. I like stack and array languages, so when I am not playing in J, I use Uiua. Uiua has the capability to do audio and graphics/animations and scratches my array/stack itch.
This is a neat project and I don't think I'm aware of any sequencers that allow for arbitrary execution per-step (not that I am that deep into the space). The font choice for the website is really... interesting. I don't think I can recall ever feeling this dyslexic trying to read the copy here.
Toffoli and Margolis's CAM-6 cellular automata machine board for the IBM-PC was programmed in FORTH. I made a simulator, and this video shows some of the original FORTH code that I saved, as well as my own compatible FORTH CA rule computer that le me run the rules from the book, which produced lookup table for the hardware, which the simulator is compatible with. I've since rewritten it in JavaScript. It's not live coding, but it has a live performance user interface (quite weird and hard to figure out, especially if you haven't read the book, but I demonstrate it in the video).
Wow! If you ever get tired of it I will buy it from you. It's impossible to find copies now, and they make great wedding or graduation presents. ;)
Just joking, I know you would never part with it!
If you were sneaky and transgressive like Aaron Schwartz, you might notice the url of the pdf file is shown in the browser bar in the video, and type in the url to steal the book:
Fortunately Norman Margolis has generously given me permission to distribute that pdf file (although I don't know what MIT Press would think about it, but if they would only get their shit together and publish the fucking book somewhere I could buy it, I would already own a pile of them to hand out to tricker-treaters and religious zealots who knock on my door, as brain candy to set them on a better path).
He's also given me permission to make interactive versions of any of those chapters, and he said that his favorites were the physical simulations, because they have something to say about nature and physics. That's definitely on my TODO list!
I'd really like to do a "KidPix" kind of cellular automata playground, like Rudy Rucker and John Walker did with Autodesk CALab. There's some great stuff from that online, including a web based version of CALab and a fieldbook of many rules in the manual:
This is one of my favorites, ECOLIBRA, which I call ECO, and used for SimCity DRM as well as demonstrated in those videos. Rudy came up with it, as an excercise in composing multiple CA rules: there is one layer of "ANNEAL" that defines whether each cell is water or land, and in land it runs "LIFE" and in water it runs "BRIAN'S BRAIN" (named after Brian Silverman, who did not actually name it after his own brain, that was somebody else attributing it to that part of his anatomy). My version actually runs "DEATH" aka "ANTI-LIFE", the one's complement of "LIFE", so that the cells of LIFE and BRAIN along the shores stimulate each other more and spawn lots of life onto land and brain into the sea, due to their "foamier" interactions along the coast.
CAM6 Demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyLMHxRNuck
Original FORTH code that drove the actual CAM-6 board:
tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-cam-forth-scr.txt
tomt-users-forth-scr.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/tomt-users-forth-scr.txt
My compatible CA compiler and glue to the simulator written in C:
cam.f.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/cam.f.txt
compile.f.txt: https://donhopkins.com/home/code/compile.f.txt
An old version of the simulator written C, before I rewrote it in JavaScript:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/tree/master/Micropol...
The JavaScript CAM6 simulator:
CAM6.js: https://github.com/SimHacker/CAM6/blob/master/javascript/CAM...
Just joking, I know you would never part with it!
If you were sneaky and transgressive like Aaron Schwartz, you might notice the url of the pdf file is shown in the browser bar in the video, and type in the url to steal the book:
https://donhopkins.com/home/cam-book.pdf <= DO NOT CLICK THIS URL! IT IS FOR EDUCATIONAL RHETORICAL PURPOSES ONLY.
Fortunately Norman Margolis has generously given me permission to distribute that pdf file (although I don't know what MIT Press would think about it, but if they would only get their shit together and publish the fucking book somewhere I could buy it, I would already own a pile of them to hand out to tricker-treaters and religious zealots who knock on my door, as brain candy to set them on a better path).
He's also given me permission to make interactive versions of any of those chapters, and he said that his favorites were the physical simulations, because they have something to say about nature and physics. That's definitely on my TODO list!
I'd really like to do a "KidPix" kind of cellular automata playground, like Rudy Rucker and John Walker did with Autodesk CALab. There's some great stuff from that online, including a web based version of CALab and a fieldbook of many rules in the manual:
https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2023/12/07/the-roaring-twent...
https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/rudy-rucker-and-john-walker...
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/
This is one of my favorites, ECOLIBRA, which I call ECO, and used for SimCity DRM as well as demonstrated in those videos. Rudy came up with it, as an excercise in composing multiple CA rules: there is one layer of "ANNEAL" that defines whether each cell is water or land, and in land it runs "LIFE" and in water it runs "BRIAN'S BRAIN" (named after Brian Silverman, who did not actually name it after his own brain, that was somebody else attributing it to that part of his anatomy). My version actually runs "DEATH" aka "ANTI-LIFE", the one's complement of "LIFE", so that the cells of LIFE and BRAIN along the shores stimulate each other more and spawn lots of life onto land and brain into the sea, due to their "foamier" interactions along the coast.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/cellab/manual/rules.html#EcoLiBra
More links here, and if you only look at one, be sure to check out Rudy's 1970's late night television style commercial with overdubbed 800 number.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42806736
There's so much about it that I love, but my favorite part of Rudy's CALab demo is the "Office of the Future" and 1-800 number at the end:
https://youtu.be/lyZUzakG3bE?t=2067