Month: January 2003

What Is It With the Ants?

John Winkelman

I got the idea for the Langton’s Ants experiment from Kevin Lindsey’s experiment . The code is my own, but the results were carefully double-checked against the original.

The “ant” follows four rules:

The ant toggles the color of its current square
The ant advances in the direction it is facing
If the new square is off, then the ant turns to the right by 90 degrees
If the new square is on, then the ant turns to the left by 90 degrees

Possible future riffs on this idea include multiple ants, multiple colors, and a hex/octal grid.

C A

John Winkelman

I had a productive evening yesterday playing around with Cellular Automata, in response to Stephen Wolfram’s magnum opus A New Kind of Science . I put together a CA generator which calculates 90 generations of a 60-cell grid. That’s 5400 cells. So when you click this here link , wait for a few seconds (around four on my monster PC) for the thing to finish crunching. It shouldn’t crush your computer, although I have not looked at it on a Macintosh. The blank right half of the file is where the (self explanatory) controls will go in the next iteration of the thing. It still has a few bugs which won’t be obvious unless you know what the thing is doing.

I will post the code when I am happy with it.

This evening I got all set up to start playing in Java. I will maybe have a more powerful version of the CA demo up in a couple of months.

Starting the Year Off Right

John Winkelman

To usher in the new year in the appropriate way I have picked up two new books: Flash Math Creativity and Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain . This year I expect es.o will have more visuals than it did in 2002.

On to other news.

Apparently there is (was?) a movement (the “Two Towers Protest”) to have The Two Towers renamed to “show increased sensitivity toward the destruction of the World Trade Center”. The organizers have even gone so far as to call the un-altered title of the movie “hate speech”. Hate speech. Peter Jackson, et.al, kept the original title of the book for the movie, and it is being called “hate speech”.

This is what I have to say about that:

1. Dear Two Towers Protest: Fuck you.

2. The Two Towers is a movie, and the World Trade Center was a tragic event. Never the two shall meet.

3. If “the people” can’t make a distinction between a fantasy movie and a terrorist attack, then “the people” deserve the angst, anger and ulcers which that will cause.

The Two Towers Protest is as much a capitalization on the 9/11 events as is the Bush Administration’s arbitrary naming of an “axis of evil”, and as are the kiosks at the outskirts of Ground Zero selling bags of dust and rubble from the buildings.

Come to think of it, the name of this moronic movement is hate speech, too. The “Two Towers Protest” shows insensitivity toward the terrible events of September 11, 2001. What applies to one must apply to all. They must REALLY hate America. The ghost of Joseph McCarthy is buggering the ghost of Thomas Jefferson in glee.

And I don’t even want to get into how, with their flawed logic, they are actually encouraging people to forget what happened last September.