It is a little over one year a ago when I created a mobile version of cellular automata in 256 rules in Tableau. Recently in the thought of a similar project, I went back to understand how I did it last year. Oh boy, I almost have to retrain myself to understand all the gory details.

I made some optimization along the way (i.e., simplified calculation and used 2 rows of data instead of 4). Suddenly it came to my mind that I can put 256 rules of the cellular automata in a single sheet. It's a bit more complex but not that much. Voila a small multiple rendition of the all the 256 varieties. Click image to go to the interactive viz.

Note that
- each rule is rendered with 2 rows of data plus data densification.
- the total number of rows is 512.
- I could have done it with 2 rows of data plus densification. Due to the need of driving the pop ups, I need the rule dimension to slice the entire chart.
- hover mouse on each cell to pop up a bigger view of the same automaton.
- for each rule or cell, width and height can be adjusted via parameters.

By laying all of 256 rules in a 16x16 grid in a raster, we observed many similarities:
- 1st column and 8th column are identical
- every other rule in 1st and 8th columns down the rows are identical
- in the 4th column, rows of odd numbers are identical. Rows 2,4,10,12 (rules 20,52,148,180) are identical. Rows 6,8,14,16 (rules 84,116,212,244) are identical.
- and many other similarities. This can be a topic of research. I guess that the research is already done somewhere.

It's a great fun to explore the different results of the simple cellular automata. Many computer pioneers such as Von Neumann and in recent times, Stephen Wolfram have done a great deal of work. Tableau has provided a great way to visualize and explore those amazing patterns. Voila the results. Feel free to download the workbook and explore the details. Leave comments if you have questions.

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(Refresh the page if you want to view the gif image multiple times. Or go to Tableau Public and click the button at the top-right corner.)

Jake and I collaborated on a dashboard. He told me that he learnt a way to create an in-place help page in Tableau. He first saw it at a conference somewhere and couldn't recall who the speaker was. So I am blogging here about it but the credit goes to somebody else. If anyone knows who the original creator is, leave a comment below.

The key idea is to float a semi transparent worksheet on top of the dashboard, where a help text box is strategically placed on top of each chart. This way, we can explain how to view each chart and what data points are important, etc. This worksheet is collapsible by a show/hide button. 

Below I would like to show how this worksheet can be constructed.

1. Sheet with a single data mark.

  • Double click the empty space in Marks panel and add two single quotes. Make the null pill a text label. This creates a single null mark.
  • Set the view as "Entire View"

2. Create an show/hide button

  • Go to the target dashboard
  • Drag a floating vertical container to the dashboard, making it cover all the area of interest.
  • Drag the Single Null Mark sheet and drop it into the above container. Hide the sheet title.
  • Create an open/close button for the container and place the button at the top-right corner.

3. Add annotations

  • Format the sheet background opacity as 70% in the layout manager             
  • Select area annotations and place them anywhere of interest. 
  • Write help text and format it to highlight important messages.  
  • The text can serve as functional guide and/or insight guide.

Here is an example. Feel free to download the workbook and explore. Click the "i" button at the top-right corner to view the in-place help. 

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