The Premise

This project was inspired by Science of the Discworld (Pratchett et al.). A passage from which describes how "chaos" and "order" types of behaviour can be observed from a simple rule based system.
The rules are this: if a square is balck then the ant will turn right, if the square is white then the ant will turn left. Once the ant leaves the square, the square turns to the opposite colour (eg. black turns to white).

The Layout

The screen was setup with 7548 squares, in a 102x74 array. Each square is 10x10 pixels.

The Results
(the red square is the ant)

The result were observed from 12:32am to 2:15am 27/02/2003.
The ant started off building this weird structure

After about 17 minutes a pattern emerged.

If the ant went off an edge, it would come back on the opposite edge.

17 minutes was about the time it took for each pattern arm to emerge. As each pattern arm returned, the chaotic region became larger.
 
The chaotic areas grew along pattern arms.

If a pattern arm collided with another that was perpendicular to it, this caused both arms to be damaged (ie. turned into chaotic stuff).
   

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