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Langton's Ant overview |
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Simple
program that uses the algorithm of the Langton's Ant
with a customizable implementation (using an external
file) to recreate a virtual world of ants. The operation of an ant is very simple: - It makes its first movement given an initial direction. - If the cell where it moves is non-RED, it changes it to RED and perform a turn of 90º at right. - If the cell where it moves is RED, it changes it to non-RED and perform a turn of 90º at left. As you can see, the rules are very simple ones, so... where is the interesting thing? you only must run the program and after about 10,000 steps, the ant will create almost-symmetrical landscapes and it will begin to create a diagonal highway. It seems that each ant suddenly know what want to do. Many of you will say that it could be random event but far from it, we can do whatever we want with these ants: put a lot of them, put obstacles, etc.. but all of them always ended up doing his diagonal highway, you should test it! From a technical point of view, Langton's Ant is a simple and deterministic discrete dynamical system. It can be viewed as a cellular automaton, as a two-dimensional Turing machine, or as an agent-system. When I say that it's discrete, I mean that there is a discrete world, which is updated in discrete time. The world is usually a bidimensional square grid but is possible to code it in other ways such as triangular grid, hexagonal grid,etc. Each position in the grid (called cells) has a state, which can be either red or non-red. The ant walks on the grid, moving according to the states it finds, and changing these states as it walks over them. The source code is free and modifiable. It compiles with Visual Studio 6, any Visual Studio .Net and GNU GCC. Original code is dated on 1998 running in MSDOS. It was ported to SDL and Win32/Linux in 2002. |
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Langton's Ant source code, binaries and screenshots |
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