This is an update to a post from March 2, 2012.
From 2002 to around 2012 I devoted most of my creative energy to programming. I created well over a hundred visual toys and simple games, and kept the momentum going until a series of life events sucked the mental and emotional energy from me. When I got my life back I turned my creative energies to writing fiction and poetry, and my decade-plus of experiments in mathematics, geometry, cellular automata and game design fell by the wayside. Most of those experiments were in Flash and though I still have the source code rebuilding them in Javascript would be an extremely time-consuming project.
But some of those experiments were in Javascript, particularly after I saw the writing on the wall for Flash and Actiosncript. This is one of those experiments – a 3D version of the Langton’s Ant cellular automation, created using hand-rolled Javascript, with an assist from the Three.js 3D rendering library.
Click here to access the Langton’s Ants in 3D experiment. Once there, you can right-click on the animation and select “save image as…” to take a screenshot of the Ant trail.
The original post from March 2, 2012, with code breakdown and explanation is here.
Here are a couple more screenshots from later iterations of the algorithm:
