Order in chaos. Love it. I have few different patterns for ants on my homepage (implemented in ugly ClojueScript).
Langton's ant
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Langton's ant
#32How about 3D Langton's (or Langtonish) ants? Or more dimensions? :)
Re: Langton's ant
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Wikipedia article contains several variations, including that one. Check the external links for videos and programs. Interestingly, multiple ants don't need conflict resolution, as two ants sharing the same cell will want to leave it at the same state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant
Thanks. I am actually looking for one with conflicting resolutions though and can't seem to find that in the links. Basically I want to make a game where you put out ants that compete somehow. Either the one with most converted tiles wins or if they can kill each other. It doesn't have to be Langton's ant specifically, just an algorithm that is as easy to understand.
I haven't thought this through, but I think a simple extension which would generate conflict would be to incorporate the ant's last movement in determining the end state of the cell it's currently on. That way, two ants arriving in the same cell from different directions would want different results.
Re: Langton's ant
#34Made a jsfiddle where you can see the ant move and die (crash) after building the highway for a while. http://jsfiddle.net/zuu7bd2e/
Thanks! It was hard to get the point of how cool this is from the animation/description in the Wikipedia article.
Re: Langton's ant
#35How about 3D Langton's (or Langtonish) ants? Or more dimensions? :)
Need at least one new rule and a new color.
Re: Langton's ant
#36I've been obsessed with Langton's ant for a good solid decade now. My latest creation is a few years old now, but occasionally I go back and add new commands. It's inspired by Langton's ant, but it operates in 45 degree increments, has the ability to fork, conditionally execute instructions, has colors, and a bunch of other interesting things. You can see it in action at http://demoseen.com/langton/#.FP$!!!!!!!!!!!!!…
This is amazing work. Langton's ant was one of the first programs I wrote in Java around 1996 so it's super fun to see what you've done with it.
Re: Langton's ant
#37But what happened to Langton himself? After leaving SFI and the Swarm corp he seems to have disappeared. I met him once - about 12 years ago - and he was the most charming, kind guy who spent three hours and a lunch with me just because I said I don't understand something he said. Then he warned me not to become too much of a generalist and specialise more. He was right, but I didn't listen to him, I was in my 20s an…
I spoke to Glen Ropella of Swarm about him in 2009 when I was writing a paper and Glen said this: "Most of the people I know related to Swarm refer people to me when they're looking for Chris. It's no mystery, though. He decided awhile back to leave the Swarm/SFI community for personal reasons. So, he's out there. He just doesn't want to work on that stuff anymore, at least as of the last time I talked to him. ... He…
I looked for Langton myself years ago when I was very into artificial life and evolutionary computing. IMHO he's one of the greatest unsung geniuses of the past 25 years.
Here's what I consider his greatest work:
http://wiki-app2.tudelft.nl/pub/Education/SPM955xABMofCAS/Le...
To give you one example: that paper is why I think Titan is the most likely world in the solar system where we might find present-day complex life. (Other than Earth of course.)
Why? There's no liquid water on the surface, and it's too cold!
Answer: phase boundaries everywhere. See Fig. 3 from paper.
Titan has a hydrocarbon-based "water cycle" with solid, liquid, and gas all existing at the same time, along with what appear to be seasons. Universal computation occurs in the vicinity of phase boundaries, so I would not be terribly surprised if we found "cryolife" there. It would be radically different from our own, but not really... I agree with people like Langton that life should be considered primarily an informatics phenomenon rather than a conventional chemical reaction or physical state.
If Titan life were intelligent, they'd regard us as hell-beasts with blood of molten water. :) We could never physically touch, as we would vaporize them and they would freeze us solid.
There's a contemporary scientist named Dr. Christoph Adami at Michigan State's new BEACON center who's probably the closest to following in Langton's footsteps.
http://www.mmg.msu.edu/adami.html
Adami expounded upon these ideas by defining life as "a phase of matter in which the dynamics of information processing overcome those of ordinary matter and energy." I am paraphrasing, and possibly butchering it a little... can't find the original quote, but that's the basic idea. Life is a phase of matter -- one whose behavior is dominated by universal Turing-complete computation. You might call living matter "Turium" or something.
The fact that this whole line of reasoning hasn't been taken up more broadly is IMHO some kind of failure of the academic and scientific system.
Re: Langton's ant
#38I've been obsessed with Langton's ant for a good solid decade now. My latest creation is a few years old now, but occasionally I go back and add new commands. It's inspired by Langton's ant, but it operates in 45 degree increments, has the ability to fork, conditionally execute instructions, has colors, and a bunch of other interesting things. You can see it in action at http://demoseen.com/langton/#.FP$!!!!!!!!!!!!!…
This is awesome - lot of fun to play with.
This is the best pattern I've been able to come up with so far:
@!!@@" rel="nofollow">http://demoseen.com/langton/#..rr@@!!@@
Re: Langton's ant
#39I've been obsessed with Langton's ant for a good solid decade now. My latest creation is a few years old now, but occasionally I go back and add new commands. It's inspired by Langton's ant, but it operates in 45 degree increments, has the ability to fork, conditionally execute instructions, has colors, and a bunch of other interesting things. You can see it in action at http://demoseen.com/langton/#.FP$!!!!!!!!!!!!!…
This is awesome - lot of fun to play with. This is the best pattern I've been able to come up with so far: @!!@@" rel="nofollow">http://demoseen.com/langton/#..rr@ @!!@@
That's really cool -- I love 'lattice' type patterns. This is my current favorite, because it seems to terminate (stabilize) and then does one last little bit. Runs for a good while before it 'terminates', as well. http://demoseen.com/langton/#.$!~PF!!!!.
Re: Langton's ant
#40> All finite initial configurations tested eventually converge to the same repetitive pattern, suggesting that the "highway" is an attractor of Langton's ant, but no one has been able to prove that this is true for all such initial configurations If Langton's ant is capable of universal computation, wouldn't non-halting programs be a counterexample to this convergence?
I'd have to agree. From my understanding of that sentence, all programs would "halt" eventually because they all end up doing the highway. So unless your computation somehow ended with the highway then you couldn't run infinitely long computations.