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Langston’s ant

Langton’s ant is a two-dimensional Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complicated emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells. The universality of Langton’s ant was proven in 2000. The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.

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:

1. At a white square, turn 90° right, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit

2. At a black square, turn 90° left, flip the color of the square, move forward one unit

These simple rules lead to surprisingly complex behavior: after an initial period of apparently chaotic behavior, that lasts for about 10,000 steps (in the simplest case), the ant starts building a recurrent “highway” pattern of 104 steps that repeat indefinitely. All finite initial configurations tested eventually converge to the same repetitive pattern suggesting that the “highway” is an attractor of Langton’s ant, but no one has been able to prove that this is true for all such initial configurations. It is only known that the ant’s trajectory is always unbounded regardless of the initial configuration.

(via fuckyeahmath)