Audio Damage Automaton - Manual (Page 6)

Online Videos of Automaton
We’ve created several videos showing Automaton in action. You might find them to be a useful addition to this
manual while learning about Automaton. The videos can be found at
http://vimeo.com/audiodamage
Introduction
The heart of the Automaton plug-in is a mathematical construction called a cellular automaton (pluralized
automata). The study of cellular automata is a wide field with applications in computer science, mathematics,
biology, and physics. We won't attempt to provide anything more than a very brief introduction here. If you're
interested in learning more about cellular automata, the Wikipedia entry is an excellent place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_automata
A cellular automaton consists of a rectangular grid of cells which we'll call the world grid or simply the world.
Each cell can be in one of two states, usually described as "alive" and "dead". Cells change from one state to
the other when a set of rules is applied to all of the cells simultaneously. Typically (and in the case of
Automaton) the rules work by counting the number of live neighbors that a cell has, and setting the state of
the cell based upon some function of the number of its neighbors and its current state. Only the cells
immediately adjacent to a cell are considered neighbors, so each cell has eight neighbors. The same set of
rules is used for each cell.
When the world is updated with a new population of cells that has been calculated by applying the rules to
every cell, we say that a new generation has been created, and that the population of the world grid has
evolved. Automaton's generations occur in sync with your plug-in host's transport, e.g. a new generation
might be calculated every eighth note.
Although the rules for a cellular automaton are usually quite simple, the manner in which the world’s
population evolves over a number of generations can be surprisingly complex and unpredictable. Geometric
patterns form and dissolve, order turns to chaos and back to order, stable groups of cells remain unchanged
and other groups pulsate and move around while spawning new groups, and so on. Automaton harnesses this
mixture of chaos and predictability to provide an inspirational new signal processor—a tiny world of effects
processing evolving inside your DAW.