Chris Langton, 1986. Langton's Ant is the simplest turmite, a 2D Turing machine that produces order from chaos after 10,000 steps. Turmites generalize to N colors and M internal states, producing highways, spirals, fractals, and binary counters. Ed Pegg survey.
How It Works
An ant sits on a colored pixel grid. At each step it reads the color under it, consults a transition table that says what color to write, which direction to turn, and what internal state to enter next. The ant then steps forward. Multiple ants can coexist and interact.
Applications
Turing-complete computation on a 2D grid. Ed Pegg and others have cataloged ants that build Fibonacci spirals, count in binary, grow fractal territories, and split into multiple ants. The parameter space is vast and mostly unexplored.
choose a preset turmite·speed controls steps per frame·click on the grid to place additional ants