Langton's Ant

Langton's Ant is a simple set of rules that are imposed on an "ant" moving through a grid, leading to complex emergent behaviour.

Program Features

• Simulate behaviour of Langton's Ant
• Change rules to observe varying emergent behaviour
• Simulate at varying speeds

Program use

• To get the code onto your machine, you can download git and directly clone this repository. This simulation requires PyFLTK preinstalled.
• If you have never used Git before, you can instead copy-paste the source code onto your own machine, save it as a new python script, and run it from there. Only the src/LangtonsAnt.py code is necessary.
• If using git, run simulation by going to the src directory and running the main script Langton.py.
• Simulation can be started/paused with buttons. Upon pause, simulation can also be reset.
• Loaded simulation can be changed from the menu. Accepts a string of length 2-12 comprising of characters ["L", "R"] (case sensitive)
• Simulation speed can be controlled using slider on the bottom. slider is logarithmic, ranging from 1-0.001s. (Innacurate, likely due to bottleneck from FLTK draw speeds)

License

This program was constructed using a Python wrapper for the FLTK toolkit. Software is issued under an MIT License.

Examples

RL (Default)

LRRL

LRLLRR

Todos

• Add multiple "ant" states functionality
• Add Hexagonal grid mode
• Fix logarithmic speed slider to go down to 1 millis

Further Reading

Langton's Ant - Wikipedia