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ThunderAnt - An Artistic Interpretation of Algorithms
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About:
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ThunderAnt is a small project our team did for the Cal vs. Stanford
"Big Hack" Hack-a-thon. The idea is simple: there's an ant on grid,
and the ant knows math. Specifically, the ant knows what a prime
number is, and while counting through all the integers, every time it
sees a prime number, it'll turn left. Otherwise, it'll walk straight.
This seems like a pretty simple concept, but the patterns that result
end up very artistically appealing and strange.

Currently, ThunderAnt only knows prime numbers, but the way our
program is set up it can easily learn any sort of algorithm (think
Fibonnaci, random integers, multiples of stuff, or cool things like
counting in more than one sequence at a time - that is, comparing
numbers or datasets).

Similarly, the output can be easily changed as well. During the
hackathon we actually wrote two versions, one for a GUI in Python and
another for PNG image output.


Setup:
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It is necessary to obtain the libpng and libpari dependencies before
making the package. Unfortunately we're not so sure how to precompile
stuff in C yet so you would need to separately get the libpng and
libpari libraries and then make it.

If you somehow succeed in making it, you can run stuff like this:

Sample configurations
    million primes (1e6)
    bh -4640 1380 121 -545
        x1   y1   x2   y2

Sample output for this configuration is attached.


Credits:
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Kelvin Li  |  Kenneth Lin  |  Michael Lin