∞ forever components

Fractals & Automata

Langton’s Ant

Langton's ant crawls a 121x121 toroidal grid, tracing cyan highways with a glowing recency trail. Auto-resets after ~14000 steps for an eternal loop.

canvasmedium complexitymoderate motion

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When to use it

Ambient generative art backgrounds, fractal/automata showcases, creative coding demos requiring low CPU draw.

When not to

Contexts needing immediate visual clarity — the emergent highway pattern takes thousands of steps to form.

Working with an AI agent

Every component ships agent-ready metadata. An example instruction for this one:

Change palette to amber: set pal to [[80,50,10],[160,100,20],[230,160,40],[255,220,100]] and update BG/C0 to warm dark tones. Theme: dark tokens live in :root, the light variant in :root[data-theme="light"]; ?theme=light or a {type:'forever:theme'} postMessage switches at runtime.

Safe to edit

  • grid size (N=121)
  • steps per frame (STEPS=90)
  • trail fade horizon (MAXAGE=900)
  • auto-reset threshold (14000 steps)
  • color palette (pal array)
  • ant head accent color (232,228,255)
  • theme tokens (:root dark defaults + [data-theme=light] overrides)

Keep intact

  • toroidal wrap logic (ax/ay bounds check)
  • Uint8Array/Uint16Array typed grid buffers
  • ImageData single-blit paint pattern
  • visibilitychange pause/resume
  • theme hook (?theme= bootstrap + forever:theme message listener + theme tokens)

Known limitations

  • Grid fixed at 121x121 — increasing N raises per-frame cost
  • Auto-reset at 14000 steps interrupts mid-highway patterns
  • Background hardcoded in both CSS and BG array — must update both to retheme

cellular-automatalangtons-antcanvasemergentgridpixelgenerative

More Fractals & Automata components

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  • Julia MorphJulia set fractal whose complex constant traces a slow Lissajous loop, morphing green filaments between connected and dendritic forms over ~70 seconds.
  • Game of LifeConway's Game of Life with glowing magenta cells aging through three color tiers; field reseeds automatically when population collapses.
  • LeniaLenia smooth-life automaton: glowing teal-to-cyan blobs drift and pulse on a dark field via a typed-array convolution sim scaled up with CSS.
  • L-System FernA fractal fern draws itself branch by branch via an L-system grammar, coloring segments brown-to-gold by depth; it holds then restarts.
  • Domain WarpSlowly flowing domain-warped fractal noise rendered in green, sage, and ink tones; layered fbm warp passes produce marbled smoke patterns.