Langton's Ant

This is an implementation in C++ language with several simulation options of Langton's Ant two-dimensional universal Turing machine invented by Chris Langton in 1986. Check more documentation of this work here.

Tech Stack

• C++ language.
• olcConsoleGameEngine.

Functionality

When running the program the user can select in between different simulation options, these include:

• Console Dimension: This refers to the size in pixels of the console where the simulation will be displayed.

• How close ants should be: This means how conglomerated the ants will be, the greater the number the closer the range.

• Number of ants.

• Queen life steps.

• Soldier life steps.

• Worker life steps.

• Percentage of queens at start.

• Percentage of soldiers at start.

• Percentage of workers at start.

By playing around with all these options one can find interesting behaviours in the colony. The program also generates a density histogram of the ants over the space.

Run the program

In order to run the program you need to:

• Download the code.
• Run in a Linux distribution (Ubuntu recommended).
• Having SDL2 and C++ installed on your computer.
• Compile with:

g++ langton.cpp -DUNICODE -I/usr/include/SDL2 -lSDL2 -lpthread -o langton.out

• Run:

./langton.out

Example of a simulation