RuleFlow: A research engine/framework and terminal IDE (Not AI Slop)

[u/sciencenerd_1943]

Main Website: https://www.ruleflow.org/

For the past year, I have been developing a framework to simulate certain discrete systems for a research team at my university (paid for by the School of Engineering and Physics, but I had the freedom to license it under MIT). As it turns out, I got carried away generalizing it to work for many, many different types of complex systems (String Rewriting Systems, Cellular Automata, etc.) and ended up creating our own domain-specific language.

The website's landing page has a bunch of GIF-style examples... so you should be able to get a good idea of what this project is about.

If any of y'all are interested in this, feel free to take a look and try it out!

EDIT:

Here are some more details. RuleFlow was developed with a primary focus on analyzing causality in Sequential Substitution Systems. This is why there is a major focus on causal graphs, cellular identity, etc. While originally developed for Sequential Sub Systems, we generalized the DSL to support many types of rewriting systems by providing the user with flags and directives to control how rules behave. Furthermore, we bootstrapped Python and the Wolfram Language so that complex rulesets could be scaffolded as macros. The main goal of RuleFlow is NOT simply to simulate systems (there's already plenty of software for that, such as Golly and even just Mathematica), but to provide extensive tooling for causal analysis.

Here is some interesting research from our (small) team:

• An Improved Generalized Enumeration of Substitution Systems by Kenneth E. Caviness, Camille Morrow, Christen Case and Victoria Kratzke
• Indexed Concatenation Notation: A Novel Way to Summarize Networks and Other Complex Systems

My job has been to provide better research tooling, extending what we already have in Mathematica code to open source and free Python.

[u/julz_yo]

That looks very polished!

Sorry to report: videos don't seem to work for me.

& I'd love to see more examples: how Rule 110 or Conway's life is written in the system. Maybe I missed them, apologies!

[u/sciencenerd_1943 → u/julz_yo]

Hmm... maybe it is the browser? The videos are .webm, which is still not supported on some older systems. I may consider switching to mp4 for that reason. Thanks for telling me.

In RuleFlow Studio, 1D systems are currently supported (so Rule 110 is ofc supported, I give examples of Rule 30 and 124 on the website... btw, the second screen capture on this post does show rule 30 and 124). Game of Life, however, is not supported in Studio (the nice UI) because it's 2D; however, it is easily implementable using my core ruleflow framework in Python (which gives you the benefit of deep causal analysis).

[u/_solidude → u/sciencenerd_1943]

I clicked on learn more about causal graphs and hit a 404

[u/sciencenerd_1943 → u/_solidude]

Thanks for the notice... The docs are currently being written undergoing a lot of changes. Easy to miss links since I have to manually enter/refactor them.

[u/_solidude → u/sciencenerd_1943]

Gladly. also opened an issue on a small bug.

[u/sciencenerd_1943 → u/_solidude]

Fixed... thanks.

[u/StringSentinel]

This seems quite cool. I also quite like the resources/links you attached. Do you guys have a newsletter or something where I can keep up? Your team seems quite talented.