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:
“In really hard times the rules of the game are altered. The inchoate mass begins to stir. It becomes potent, and when it strikes,... it strikes with incredible emphasis. Those are the rare occasions when a national will emerges from the scattered, specialized, or indifferent blocs of voters who ordinarily elect the politicians. Those are for good or evil the great occasions in a nation’s history.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“For rhetoric, he could not ope
His mouth, but out there flew a trope;
And when he happen’d to break off
I’ th’ middle of his speech, or cough,
H’ had hard words ready to show why,
And tell what rules he did it by;”
—Samuel Butler (1612–1680)
“When I hear the hypercritical quarreling about grammar and style, the position of the particles, etc., etc., stretching or contracting every speaker to certain rules of theirs ... I see that they forget that the first requisite and rule is that expression shall be vital and natural, as much as the voice of a brute or an interjection: first of all, mother tongue; and last of all, artificial or father tongue. Essentially your truest poetic sentence is as free and lawless as a lamb’s bleat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)