Art in Motion vs Langton's Ant

Art in Motion is a new kind of art application. It’s based on the idea that art should evolve with technology. The iPad is the best multi-touch device on the market, and it is packed with huge processing power. Standard drawing can be very fun, but it hardly makes full use of these advancements in technology. How does Art in Motion compare to standard drawing? • With Art in Motion you create a scene instead of a painting. • Instead of drawing mountains, or trees, you customize and add orbs to your scene. • Instead of looking at your drawing, you watch your orbs come alive. • Unlike a painting, there is motion and life in your creation. You can even interact with your scene. • In a painting colors don’t change, in the scene colors fade and flow constantly. What are some examples of scenes I can create? • By adding many small orbs with little friction and bounce, you can create a water effect. It can slosh around realistically as you tilt your iPad. • You can create a large orb with gravity, and many smaller ones. Watch them as they orbit around like comets flying around a star. • You can create a scene where brilliant colors follow your fingers as you touch the screen. • You can create a scene where you fling fireworks with your fingers and watch them explode into beautiful colors. Features • Powerful physics engine • 20 bundled scenes (to play with and study) • Intuitive interface for creating new scenes of your own • Full multi-touch support, so all 10 fingers can play at once • Many settings allowing for unique and one of a kind scenes • Clear documentation • VGA out support What are people saying about it? • "... very organic, smooth, I like it a lot!" Jordan Rudess from Dream Theater! • “It’s what they would use on board the USS Enterprise for entertainment” G. C. • "Be prepared to melt away hours of your night!" J. S. • “Every iPad owner should have this app, there’s nothing like it!” C. K.

Langton’s Ant is a cellular automaton that models an ant moving on a grid of cells following some very basic rules. At the start of the simulation, the ant is randomly positioned on a 2D-grid of white cells. The ant is also given a direction (either facing up, down, left or right). The ant then moves according to the colour of the cell it is currently sitting in, with the following rules: 1.If the cell is white, it changes to black and the ant turns right 90°. 2.If the cell is black, it changes to white and the ant turns left 90°. 3.The ant then moves forward to the next cell, and repeat from step 1. These simple rules lead to complex behaviours. Three distinct modes of behaviour are apparent, when starting on a completely white grid: - Simplicity: During the first few hundred moves it creates very simple patterns which are often symmetric. - Chaos: After a few hundred moves, a big, irregular pattern of black and white squares appears. The ant traces a pseudo-random path until around 10,000 steps. - Emergent order: Finally the ant starts building a recurrent “highway” pattern of 104 steps that repeats 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.