Ecce Sigum

Tag: Flash

  • A New Project

    Things were kind of slow at work today, so I whipped together a little Flash photo album . It is functional, but far from finished. Considering it took me a day to build, I am kind of proud of it.

  • Trip Toy

    Oh, call me an insane genius, but I think this is kind of cool. I mean, I was going for a shading algorithm, and the next thing I know I’m drooling on my keyboard. Go figure.

  • Not Dead, Merely Sleeping

    …and trying to figure out how to do this in Flash.

  • A Flash Break

    Today I learned how to do object oriented programming in Flash. Click on the movie to bring it into focus, then use the arrow keys to move around.

  • What Is It With the Ants?

    I got the idea for the Langton’s Ants experiment from Kevin Lindsey’s experiment . The code is my own, but the results were carefully double-checked against the original.

    The “ant” follows four rules:

    The ant toggles the color of its current square
    The ant advances in the direction it is facing
    If the new square is off, then the ant turns to the right by 90 degrees
    If the new square is on, then the ant turns to the left by 90 degrees

    Possible future riffs on this idea include multiple ants, multiple colors, and a hex/octal grid.

  • Back to School

    Play .

    Hypothesis: Stability in a bounded environment requires a repeating pattern.

    Watch .

  • More of the Same, Yet Different

    Still another variation as I climb toward Cellular Apotheosis. This one elegantly captures the elusive beauty of the poetically named “Rule 149”. It shouldn’t beat up any computers too badly, but it will run faster on more powerful machines. Obviously.

  • More CA

    Scott played around with my code, then I played around with his code, and this is what we did . It should be much easier on the processor than was yesterday’s experiment. Just sit back, grab a beer, and enjoy.

  • C A

    I had a productive evening yesterday playing around with Cellular Automata, in response to Stephen Wolfram’s magnum opus A New Kind of Science . I put together a CA generator which calculates 90 generations of a 60-cell grid. That’s 5400 cells. So when you click this here link , wait for a few seconds (around four on my monster PC) for the thing to finish crunching. It shouldn’t crush your computer, although I have not looked at it on a Macintosh. The blank right half of the file is where the (self explanatory) controls will go in the next iteration of the thing. It still has a few bugs which won’t be obvious unless you know what the thing is doing.

    I will post the code when I am happy with it.

    This evening I got all set up to start playing in Java. I will maybe have a more powerful version of the CA demo up in a couple of months.

  • Notes from the Deep Fields

    The new computer isn’t in yet. I suspect the labor disputes among the dock-workers on the West coast have something to do with that. Not having a computer at home means going back to work at night and working on my site when no-one else is around. The new re-build you see before you is the result. The old design wasted too much real-estate.

    Today I will be attending the Homecoming game at my old high school . I haven’t seen one of those in… oh, about fifteen years. Coincidentally, this was to be the weekend of the fifteenth reunion of the Class of 1987, but due to lack of interest, it was downgraded to “hanging out in a bar after the game”.

    Played around a little with the Flash MX Drawing API again last night, and here is the result .