A New Kind of Science: The NKS Forum (http://forum.wolframscience.com/index.php)
- Pure NKS (http://forum.wolframscience.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=3)
-- Questions from a new user (http://forum.wolframscience.com/showthread.php?threadid=796)

Questions from a new user

Hi, I am new to NKS but not to Mathematica.
Is there any general reference or articles which will help me getting started using the NKS package in Mathematica? I find the available documentation not very helpful. The kind of questions I have are: why do I have to list a page number in NKSDisplay? --- I have found that if I put in '35' for the page number I can then put in any rule I want, but then why require a page number at all?
Thanks for any help.

Pages and illustrations within the NKS book are simply the way NKS Explorer identifies specific systems. There are many types of systems, some of them with different enumeration schemes. Rule 30 on a page dealing with elementary cellular automata refers to the famous rule 30 2 color ECA, but there is also a 30th outer totalistic 2 D cellular automaton with 4 neighbors, unrelated to it. The number specifies a rule only within an enumeration or system type. In ordinary Mathematica code, you specify the exact system by the function you are calling, or its other parameters. The idea here is readers of the NKS book do not need to know every function used, they can just ask for the function that made graphic m on page n. I hope this helps.

Thanks for your reply. I have been finding some functions, that are more general and do what I want like:
ArrayPlot[CellularAutomaton[30, {{1}, 0}, 50]]
Is there any general introduction to such functions and their use?

Yes, those are now built in functions in Mathematica. You can get information about how they work, their various formats and options, from the help browser. Just open help and try typing in the function name at the top, and you navigate to the page in the help describing that function. For a fast look at the standard syntax and a brief description of what it does, just type ?functionname in the main window of your notebook.

ArrayPlot is a general graphics function that expects a 2D array of integers. CellularAutomaton is a powerful built in function that computes the evolution history of any CA you ask for, any number of dimensions, colors, offsets, etc. If you have specific questions about how to use either, that the help can't answer for you, feel free to ask here.