Automatons vs Langton's Ant

Automatons is an implementation of two-dimensional cellular automatons. Each cell has eight neighbors. Whether the cell lives, dies or is born in the next generation is determined by how many neighbors are currently alive. John Conway's Game of Life is just one example of the automatons you can create. In fact, there are 262,144 possible automatons to explore! Automatons is entertaining for novices and subject experts. Start with a random initial condition and see the patterns and symmetries that develop over time. We've included a number of preset patterns that have nice behaviors for certain conditions. For example, for Life (B3/S23) there is a preset of a glider gun and a lightweight spaceship. You can also insert a custom pattern to see how it evolves over time! Explore different initial conditions and and discover beautiful patterns and surprising results.

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.