Rules
Squares on a plane are colored variously either black or white. We arbitrarily identify one square as the "ant". The ant can travel in any of the four cardinal directions at each step it takes. The ant moves according to the rules below:
- At a white square, turn 90° right, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit
- At a black square, turn 90° left, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit
Langton's ant can also be described as a cellular automaton, where the grid is colored black or white, the "ant" square has one of eight different colors assigned to encode the combination of black/white state and the current direction of motion of the ant.
Read more about this topic: Langton's Ant
Famous quotes containing the word rules:
“Under the rules of a society that cannot distinguish between profit and profiteering, between money defined as necessity and money defined as luxury, murder is occasionally obligatory and always permissible.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“[O]ur rules can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)