Hexagonal Langton's Ant 2 – Colors, Gliders and Highways | Hacker News Reader

Hexagonal Langton's Ant 2 – Colors, Gliders and Highways

brtmr.de

37 pointsbrtmr13 comments

Love it! Here are some cool patterns:

  * RPB - Looks like a 3D printer printing a bowl of Cheerios
  * PRLL - Simplest Eastbound highway
  * BRSS & BLPP - Nearly space-filling hex spirals

Thanks! I have also discovered a pattern that is fully space-filling: BPBBP - will slowly fill the entire screen with a growing green hexagon, with a single yellow dot at the origin.

Great work! I build[1] a classic javascript interpreter for Langton's Ant a few years ago. Just updated it to include support for custom rules. Thanks for reminding me about Langton's Ant it is always cool to recall things one build in the past.

[1]: http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/CJpjl

My versions of the same fwiw:

- https://jcorbin.github.com/hexant -- the hexagonal one I'm working on now

- https://jcorbin.github.io/ants -- the square grid one I made several years ago

e.g., here's a neat one: http://jcorbin.github.io/hexant/#colors=light%28360%2C%20100...

woa. that looks awesome ;) what am i looking at - whats the rule? and are you also coloring the spaces the ant has already been on, but that reverted to their original state?

It's not the most obvious UX but hit "/" to open the rules dialog, this rule set is "ant(2L 64F 2S)". Click through to the project page and check out the README for more info on the key binds: https://github.com/jcorbin/hexant.

The coloring trick is a recent addition I call "redraw tracing"; essentially there are two color palettes: one for "cold cells" and "hot cells" (ones that haven't/have been visited "recently").

What makes it "redraw" tracing is that "recent" is simply defined as "since last full redraw". Full redraws are triggered when the ant hits an edge of the screen.

I plan to expand the tracing to support "last-N" tracing where "recent" would mean something more comprehensible like "in the last 1024 iterations" f.e.

Nice! I like how the world grows with the movement of the ant, as opposed to my rather boring static one

BSPSPSPSPSP - This program/configuration appears to execute a random walk. Hard to be sure.

Well, it's deterministic, because the program is deterministic, but it certainly does look random.

So this is how the universe's only electron updates the state of every atom! Maybe.

BRL - seems to have rotational symmetry, grows very slowly, not sure if it repeats. Would make a good loading spinner.

I'd love that as an animated android background.

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