Week7 Cellular Automata

This week I watched a Youtube Video by Veritasium which talkes about synchronization in nature. I was very inspired by the idea that tiny individual interactions affect the whole system.

I want to understand how can you figure out the properties of the whole given the properties of the parts?
---- Prof. Steven Strogatz

I built the sketch based on the idea of Fireflies by Nicky Case. All dots are individuals doing rotations with random initial phases. the hue is showing the phase and the saturation is match to the system’s variance.
Once the simulation starts, each dots will starts transforming their phases toward their neighbors. So the all dots phase will become more and more similar & gray & synced.

You may access this sketch down below or with this link.

What I didn’t expect is that it kinda looks like another Nicky’s work - Parable of the Polygons. One big difference is when a dot meets another one with different property, it changes itself to match the other instead of going away.

I add some tweakable parameters and a variance monitor to see how it changes. Here are how those parameters work:

• “Range” is the distance that counts as a neighbor.
• “Speed”, is how fast a dot is trying to fit to others.
• “Difference” is how tolerant are they to accept a different one as neighbor.

With the simulation, I have found many interesting effects of the whole system. One main idea is that it shows the importance of diversity and openness. I’ll try to add more complex behavior to those single element and see it can tell a better story.

Thank you for watching, stay creative!