"APPLE COMPUTER, INC. MAKES NO WARRANTIES WHATSOEVER, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, REGARDING THIS PRODUCT, INCLUDING WARRANTIES WITH RESPECT TO ITS MERCHANTABILITY OF ITS FITNESS FOR ANY PARTICULAR PURPOSE." Neither do I.
"The MacApp software is proprietary to Apple Computer, Inc. and is licensed to Fred J. Condo Jr. for distribution only for use in combination with the Hodgepodge 2.0 program."
Apple is a registered trademark and Macintosh and MacApp are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.
If you downloaded this program, you probably have already read the August 1988 issue of Scientific American. That is where you will find A. K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreations" column discussing Hodgepodge cellular automatons. The "About box" of the program also contains more information. By the way, the article contains several omissions and errors, so don't try to implement your own Hodgepodge from the information therein. You can get details from me by dropping me a line at one of my electronic addresses listed in the About box.
Hodgepode has 4 menus: the "Apple" menu, the File menu, the Edit menu, and the Control menu. The first three operate exactly as you would expect from other Macintosh applications, except that I don't bother supporting the Edit menu, since Hodgepodge data isn't worth cutting and pasting.
The Control menu contains three commands: Go/Stop, Drawing, and Home window. Go starts the automaton calculating. Go changes to Stop whenever calculation is going on. Stop does the obvious. When a Hodgepodge window is going, the status area at the top of the window gets a heavier black border than when it is stopped.
Drawing lets you toggle drawing on and off. When Drawing is checked, the window will redraw at the end of every automaton cycle, and will redraw when a section of the window that was previously covered is uncovered. By selecting Drawing, you can turn drawin off, since the amount of data in a Hodgepodge window can be very great, which makes window updates quite lengthy. If you turn Drawing on, the window is immediately redrawn.
Home window moves the frontmost window to the upper left hand corner of your screen.
When you select New from the File menu, a dialog box comes up asking you for the parameters of the new Hodgepodge automaton. The About box contains details about these parameters, as does the Scientific American article.
Hodgepodge runs on any Macintosh except the 512 unenhanced and the 128K Macintosh. You can create as many Hodgepodge windows as you have memory for, and they will run simultaneously. Hodgepodge runs in the background under MultiFinder™. On the Macintosh II, you can get very beautiful color displays.
Please note that Hodgepodge was created with a beta version of MacApp (2.0b5, to be precise). Because of this, Hodgepodge is not robust under low memory conditions. Hodgepodge gives you a range of automaton cell array sizes from 5-by-5 cells to 240-by-240 cells. At this highest size, every cell of the array is represented by a single pixel on the screen. A 240-by-240 array requires 230K of RAM just for the array. Smaller sizes require 58K for the array. Every doubling of size quadruples the amount of time required to calculate a cycle.
Because Macintoshes other than the Macintosh II must use patterns to distinguish levels of cell "infection," I don't recommend the two highest array sizes (120-by-120 and 240-by-240) except on the Macintosh II (although they will calculate and display properly).
I hope you enjoy investigating the Hodgepodge cellular automaton with this program. If you have any comments, please drop me a line at one of the electronic addresses listed in the About box. Thanks to Ken McLeod, without whose original version of Hodgepodge this version would not have been possible.
