OCA:Paterson's worms
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Paterson's worms are a family of cellular automata devised in 1971 by Mike Paterson and John Horton Conway. The worms were described by Michael Beeler in June 1973, and presented in November of that year in Martin Gardner's "Mathematical Games" column in Scientific American.
Rules
The worm starts at some point of an infinite triangular grid. It starts moving along one of the six gridlines that meet at each point and, once it has travelled one unit of distance, it arrives at a new point.
The worm then decides, based on the distribution of traversed and untraversed gridlines, what direction it will take. The directions are relative to the worm's point of view. If the worm has not encountered this exact distribution before it may leave along any untraversed gridline. From then on, if it encounters that distribution again, it must move in the same way.
If there are no untraversed gridlines available, the worm dies and the simulation ends.
See also
External links
- Paterson's worms at Wikipedia