This Cellular Automata (CA) was created as a tool to explore how growth is created through CA. A CA is defined by the cells within a grid structure, its neighbours, the set of states (usually 1 or 0), and a set of rules that result from the neighbouring cells.  CA is often described as a built machine that can generate cities based on set rules, and can lead to growth and understanding of change by the use of rule changes (Batty, 2011).

The Graphical Interface is the major function in this visualisation that we wanted to focus on in order to provide an opportunity for public engagement and enable the audience to utilise the visualisation. This is achieved by integrating buttons and the ability to set variables to the CA. These buttons allow the user to set the starting position of the CA by simple drag and drop movement, and then define the variables for Clustering and Settling. These two variables are very much interrelated but a help file has been provided to give the user a greater opportunity of understanding of CA.

An added functionality allows the user to use the zoomed in or larger zoomed out version of the London Thames, to explore the different effects and the wider distribution of the growth.  This zoomed out feature also allows for closer comparison of the CA growth to the real growth of London in the earlier visualisation.

For the interactive version of this CA, please select the visualisation below.