Visualizing wolfram patterns with monmonmonsters

L.J — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 05:59:37 +0000

Interested in creating a simple form of “stand alone complex”, I decided to use wolfram’s one-dimension cellular automata as the underneath engine for the monsters. The color, dancing pattern, dancing amplitude are driven by different sets of CA rules.

Play monmon “CA” monster here: http://leejayxia.com/processing/monmonmonster_wolfram/

or on openprocessing: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=1326

Monmonmonster

L.J — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:32:02 +0000

I spent hours playing with processing monsters last night and ended up with my little monster creation with cellular automata. I was excited about the possibility of creating a “complex” in between chaos and periodical oscillation but still feel confused to create one from scratch. A possible approach could be build a new visual/behavior/whatever upon a proved “complex” generation system like Wolfram’s class IV rules.

In this simple sketch the little monsters start with a random pace of dancing on their own. Later on they feel embarrassed being dancing out of sync with their friends, so they try to match up the pace and eventually align with the whole group. Hovering the mouse over an individual monster will slow it down a little bit, and this will affect its neighbors also, but subtly.

The video quality seems terribly downgraded when I uploaded it to vimeo. Will try to fix it soon.

UPDATE: See raw mov file here: http://blip.tv/file/get/Leejayxia-monmonmonster431.mov

Processing applet here: http://openprocessing.org/visuals/?visualID=1214

lithium flowers bloom » Cellular automata

Visualizing wolfram patterns with monmonmonsters

Monmonmonster