Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Wolfram Summer School

Alumni

Slobodan Savic

Summer School

Class of 2004

Bio

Slobodan Savic is a physics student in his fourth year at the University of Zagreb. He has many hobbies, including computer programming, playing chess, international travel, and reading classic literature. He also likes to model professional sports with Monte Carlo methods.

Project: Testing Two-Neighbor Cellular Automata for Randomness

This project was about searching through the radius 1½ cellular automata, of which there are 65356, and making a list of class 3 rules, like elementary rule 30. All of these rules can be used to create random sequences of numbers, like rule 30 is used in Mathematica. After that the plan was to test all of these rules by the die-hard battery of randomness tests. Most of these tests are very hard to pass, meaning that most randomness generators, especially hardware generators, fail them. The goal was to see what cellular automata are good random generators, and how good they are. Another goal was to see which tests are typically difficult to pass by cellular automata and which are easy.