A couple of years ago I wrote a program. I didn't have a clear purpose in mind in writing it. I guess it was meant to be (a) A computer art project (b) An example of a complex system (c) A metaphor for insect life (d) A demonstration that a computer can be behave in a biological/creative manner.
But really I wrote it because I wondered what the program I had in mind would look like when run. Screen shots from this program will go up in a subsequent post. Today I give the wider world access to this program of mine released under the GPL (which means you can do almost whatever you like with it!).
The program is a simulation of Turing machines operating in 2 dimensions of tape. The Turing machines can turn left, right, go forward, backwards and change the colour of the square they are hovering over. They do this according to a simple program (randomly generated).
The program can be found at [this page] on my blog. At the beginning of this program there are various variables that you can set to get different images.
ScreenOpt=12 or 13 (12 is high resolution, 13 low)
numTermites=1-30 (Number of the Turing machines operating simultaneously)
NumColours=1-32 (Number of colours that are available for the Turing machines)
bias = 0 to 4 (The higher the number the more the machines tend to use a smaller palette of colours)
wrap = 0 or 1 (Set to 1 the machines wrap around the screen like the ship does in the game asteroids. Set to 0 and the edge of the screen becomes a boundary)
blawhi =0 or 1 (If the screen is set to low resolution you can choose to have the colours all shades of grey)
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