Langton's Ant

A complete description of Langton's Ant. Read more details here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldoaldo...

Una descrizione completa della formica di Langton. Ulteriori dettagli qui: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aldoaldo...

• Category

  Science & Technology

[will4210]

It would be nice to have a screensaver like this. Randomly generated rules that fit a variety of colors. If it hits the edge of the monitor, it turns.

[aldoaldoz]

It's more or less what I did. I wrote a program to try all the possible 12 steps sequences, saving the result to disk after the hit of the edge, or after a maximum of some million steps. The day after (!) it was only matter to browse the results!

[msclrhd]

If you make the world wrap around, they end up creating a hive (blob) - highway network on the screen. If you then add more than one, they either (a) create - destroy a pattern endlessly (b) create hive - highway structures as normal or (c) create an expanding diamond structure (which expands - collapses if the world is wrap around).

I also tried rules where an ant would not turn for a given colour. When ants create a line of this colour it acts as a super-highway an ant can travel on one time.

[aldoaldoz]

I already did some experiments with "stright" and "return back" colors. Also did some experiments with triangular and hexagonal cells, as well as with a 3D, cubic space: the ant could go up, down, left, right, ahead and back! In this video my intention was only to show how the simplest rule cuold result in a high complexity: may be in the future I create another video with such variations.

[GugiMandini]

what desides what colour the grey squares will be?

[aldoaldoz]

Gray squares are the same as white squares - I used the color gray to keep track of the unused squares (that is, those vaven't already been reached by the ant). So in the first "highway" a gray square (unused) becomes red, then white (used), then red, white and so on.

[z4ckEd]

Reminds me of Conway's Game of Life

[flup732]

lol

[csper jk]

is there source code

[Andy Green]

I would want to see multiple ants (with multiple rules) acting on the same grid, overwriting each each others' tracks and creating strange emergent patterns. :)

[Andy Green]

2:22 looks like a perfect city map generator. :)

[Andy Green]

A few years ago, I tried to create a 2D video game terrain generator based on Langton's Ant rules. The results were quite interesting.

[MatthewJLeming]

Given enough time, the ant will draw porn.

[jursmin]

Wow, that is beautiful! Have you tried more ants at the same time?

[gametechish]

2:46 Puke