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Bruce Williamson's picture

Antics

The ant was amazing. I noticed that the roads were always diagonal one way or the other, never any other direction. Creating the road starting blocks turned out to be too difficult for me to get by trial. I think with enough experiments I could create starting conditions, but having seen them later I realized that I could not get them from the beginning of the finished road pattern. THe starting conditions are 'ruined' by the ant moving through them. I guess they might be found near the end of the road. I can see this and the Life game being used as arguments against a creator, since order is created here with only some rules. For the classroom, I can see that my ideas of order need to include the ideas of students and what they will do. Changing the rules for Langston's Ant to 2 steps forward expanded the action so that the view box did not show enough area for me to discover if the ant ever gained order or not. Looking for the broader/larger view, another lesson, might show that it does or it might not. Regards,
Bruce

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