An automaton is any mechanism whose movement or operation follows automatically from its design or programmed instructions. Once set into motion, the automaton carries out its movement or action without need of additional instructions and without intervention from outside agents.
The automata which are modeled in this application are composed of a set of spheres whose size and axis are relative to one another, and where each sphere is rolling upon the surface of one other sphere in a fully deterministic pattern in space and in time. Because an automaton must have a finite number of spheres, one of the spheres cannot be rolling along the surface of another and so that sphere is made to be stationary relative to the viewpoint. The paths through space taken by one or more points within each sphere can also be visualized as the automaton carries out is choreographed movements. The combination of spatial relationships and temporal relationships described above constitute a fully deterministic pattern of movement in space and time for a finite set of spheres, and so I call these things automata. This application is a laboratory for the synthesis of the automata.
Automaton images can be printed, or saved as files of types BMP, JPEG, and PNG. And AVI movies can be created by stitching together many frames of animation.
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