David's Blague

So, after reading dchud's post about the last applet, I got thinking about various mash-ups I could, well, mash.

I'm still playing around with some variations on clustering and obstacles (something he mentioned in conversation), but realized I needed to make the original a little bit dumber before making it any smarter. Thus, I have replaced the previous applet's behavior of moving cells that are over the threshold to a random location. Now, instead, they move Brownian style. Any cell over its threshold simply swaps with a random pick of the eight cells adjacent to it.

Interestingly, it results in a whole new class of pictures.

Actually, I adjusted the ratio of green/magenta cells to be exactly equal, and removed the "empty" cells, since theres no need of them in the Brownian motion context.

The results are here.

The applet works the same as the other- click to randomize, space to start. It takes a lot longer to settle into a fully stable state, but there are obvious structures only a few generations in. I think it looks kind of like an ant farm.

Labels: brownian motion, cellular automata, pretty, processing, programming, schelling