Monday, October 6, 2008

Modeling Exclusion Through Zone-building

In order to see emergent patterns resulting from zone-building over time, I built a synthetic bio-model in Processing. In the model, a single autonomous agent wanders randomly through a landscape of equally scattered white and black pixels. The white pixels are open space, the black are obstructions (designated to be waste in my system). When the agent encounters a black pixel, it picks it up and carries it. Encountering another black pixel signals the agent to drop its current load, turn away, and continue wandering.

The model runs at 30 frames per second and exports a still image at regular intervals.

This sample landscape was fairly extensive (at 720 x 480 dimensions) and ran for 12 hours. This is a still from tZero:















And, the same landscape 12 hours later, or frame 2,678,400:















This sample landscape was smaller (300 x 200), this is frame 3600 (two minutes):











And, 24 hours later:











Another 300 x 200 landscape, at 20 minutes:











And, 32 hours later:












These soft-synth bio-models are based on Mitchel Resnick's "termite" model (but authored in Processing, not OpenStarLogo).