Sidewalks Made by Ants Screen Saver

A sidewalk is a swath of pixels that gets painted in an orderly fashion such that a solid area is filled in. The ant constructs the sidewalk by iterating the same pattern over and over, thus producing a straight sidewalk that is several times wider than the ant.

In order to express the concept of ants constructing sidewalks, I added an option to the program to actually draw ants rather than circles or squares. Here is the result, showing several ants drawn as ants, constructing sidewalks.

In the next image, the sidewalk construction is interrupted by a grid in the background. Every time the ant encounters a grid line, the net vector of the sidewalk is changed by 90 degrees. Normally, this would cause an ant to traverse a square, but in this case, it traverses a sort of square spiral.

Here is an example of several ants constructing sidewalks oriented at different angles. It is surprising how many angles are actually possible. Here you can see several angles in one image.

Send comments to author, Victor Engel at victor@victorengel.com.

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