Langton's ant

Two-dimensional Turing machine with emergent behavior / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Langton's ant is a two-dimensional universal Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complex emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells.[1] The universality of Langton's ant was proven in 2000.[2] The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.

LangtonsAnt.svg
Langton's ant after 11,000 steps. A red pixel shows the ant's location.