Generate Figures and Animations

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 20:59:00 +0100

Cellular automata are visual systems.

That makes figures and animations unusually important.

But a useful image is not merely a screenshot. It should be a reproducible output of an experiment.

Save figures from data, not from memory

Suppose an experiment has produced a spacetime history:

history = np.stack(states)

A figure generator should accept that result explicitly:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


def save_spacetime(history, path):
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 6))
    ax.imshow(history, interpolation="nearest", aspect="auto")
    ax.set_xlabel("cell")
    ax.set_ylabel("time")
    fig.tight_layout()
    fig.savefig(path, dpi=180)
    plt.close(fig)

(Verified headless: PNG written with labeled axes from recorded arrays.)

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Generate Figures and Animations

Save figures from data, not from memory