Tag Archives: generative

Neighborhoods: Experimenting with Cyclic Cellular Automata

Cellular Automata, , , , , ,

On candy stripe legs the Spiderman comes, softly through the shadow of the evening sun (Lullaby, The Cure)

Cellular automata are an inmense source of artistical images. Today, I experimented with Cyclic automata, which are ruled with these simple rules:

  • Create a grid of cells.
  • Give a state to each cell randomly; states a numbers between 0 and M-1 (you choose the value of M previously).
  • For each cell, count how many of its neighbouring cells have their state value exactly 1 unit greater than the cell’s state.
  • If the resulting number is greater than a certain thresold (that you also choose previously) increment the state of the cell by 1; if cell state reaches value of M, then you have to put 0 (in other words, you have to add 1 modulus M).
  • Repeat two previous steps a number of times.

A key concept in this algorithm is defining which is the neighborhood of a cell. There are two of them quite famous: Moore and Von Neumann neighborhoods, but you can define your own ones. Once you decide to stop iterating, you can give color to each cell according its final state, and you will obtain images like this one:

If you have a look to the code, you will see the next parameters:

  • neighborhood: the pattern of neighbouring cells
  • range: the depth of neighborhood
  • states: maximum number of states allowed (the M of the algorithm)
  • thresold
  • iter: number of iterations
  • width and height of the grid

Apart from Moore and Von Neumann, I implemented some other neighborhoods. This chart shows some of them. In columns you can find the folowing: M (Moore), N (Von Neumann), Mr (Moore remote), Nr (Von Neumann remote), Cr (Cross), S1 (S-Shape #1), Bl (Blade), C2 (Corners #2) and TM (Tick Mark). In rows, you can find different ranges for each neighborhood, from 1 to 4:

You will find more neighborhood in the code of the experiment, which is here. There are infinite combinations of the previous parameters, and each one results in a different image:


I used again COLOULovers palettes As always, I encourage you to experiment with the code, create your own neighborhoods, and see how they work. Happy New Year 2021!

Kites and Darts: the Penrose Tiling

Drawings, , , , , ,

Agarrada a mis costillas le cuelgan las piernas (Godzilla, Leiva)

Penrose tilings are amazing. Apart of the inner beauty of tesselations, they have two interesting properties: they are non-periodic (they lack any translational symmetry) and self-similar (any finite region appears an infinite number of times in the tiling). Both characteristics make them a kind of chaotical as well as ordered mathematical object that make them really appealing.

In this experiment I create Penrose tilings. Concretely, the P2 tiling, according to this article from Simon Tatham, that I will follow and provides a perfect explanation of how these tessellations can be constructed. The code is available here, and you can use it to create Penrose tilings like this one:

I will not explain in depth how to build the P2 tiling, since the article I mentioned before does it perfectly. Instead of that, I will give some highlights of the process together with a brief explanation of the code involved in it.

Everything has to do with triangles. Concretely, everything has to do with two types of triangles. To differenciate them I name their sides with numbers. The first triangle has labels 1, 2 and 3 and the other one has labels 1, 2 and 4. Two triangles of type 123 forms a kyte like this:

On the other hand, two triangles of type 124 forms a dart like this:

Actually, kites and darts don’t contain their inner segments so both of them are polygons of 4 sides. The building of a Penrose tiling is an iterative process that begins with 5 kites (i.e. 10 triangles of type 123) gathered like this:

You can start with many other patterns but this one will result in a round shape tiling and I like it. I build the tiling by subdividing triangles as Simon describes in his article. A triangle of type 123 is subdivided into three triangles: two of type 123 and one of type 124. The following image shows a 123 triangle (left) and the result after its division (right):

A triangle of type 124 is subdivided into two triangles: one of type 123 and one of type 124. The following image shows a 124 triangle (left) and the result after its division (right):

In each iteration, all triangles are subdivided according its type. After 5 iterations, the resulting pattern is like this:

To make calculations easier I arranged the data frame following a segment structure, in which the sides of triangles are defined by two coordinates: (x, y) and (xend, yend). The bad side of it is that I have rounding problems after making some iterations. It makes the points that would be the same differs slightly because they come from different triangles. I fix it using a hierarchical clustering and substituting points by its centroids after cutting up the dendogram using a very low thresold. Once this problem is solved I can remove the inner segments of all kites and darts, which are segments of type 3 or 4. Apart of removing them, I join the xx triengles to form 4-sides polygons. All these tasks are done with the function Arrange_df (remember that the code is here). This is the result:

This pattern is quite similar to its previous one but now the data frame is ready to be arranged as a polygon using the function Create_Polygon. At least, I calculate the area of each polygon with the Shoelace formula to create a columns called area which I use to fill polygons with two nice colors.

I hope that these explanations will help you to understand and improve the code as well as to invite you to create your own Penrose tilings.