There are explicit generators for renowned automata such as as Life , WireWorld , Bank's rule, Fredkin's XOR rule, or the Zhabotinsky reaction.
Additionally, bitplanes for the Moore (2,1) neighborhood and the (4,1) von Neumann neighborhood can be edited. Much work remains to be done to facilitate bitplane editing, especially with the help of a mouse. Up to the present, the area of editing Margolus planes has been completely untouched.
For many applications, simple patterns or random fields provide good initial configurations. CAMEX has instructions that will create various patterns, with densities which are parameters which the user can set to preferred values. No doubt as time passes and experience accumulates, and especially as a repertoire of basic techniques accumulates, the generation of sample bitplanes will become simultaneously more concrete and more varied.
Naturally, constant fields can be provided; there are some other designs, such as checkerboards, with their own parameters. Besides that, shifting and permutation of the bitplanes can be performed.
Some of the submenus contain provisions for loading prepared bitplanes from disk files, and also to save them from time to time while running CAMEX . Insofar as these facilities exist, they are discussed separately, in the context of their own submenus.
The layout of the main menu is shown in the accompanying diagram, Figure .