Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
Sometimes I consider myself a fisherman. Computer programs and ideas are the hooks, rods, and reels. Computer pictures are the trophies and delicious meals. A fisherman does not always know what the waters will yield… Often the specific catch is a surprise.
“It has been since the eighteenth century some kind of dream that science was missing the evolution of shape in space and the evolution of shape in time.”
Albert Libchaber, via James Gleick’s “Chaos“
Random walk based on the decimal expansion of pi (from the previous post), but this time in 3d space. Created using Processing and OpenGL.
Click on images for full-size.
While John Venn is best-known for the Venn Diagram, Alex Bellos mentions Venn’s other invention in his quite-good book “Here’s Looking at Euclid” (page 231). Venn was the first to create a “random walk” or “drunk walk”. Using the decimal expansion of pi, each digit is seen as a cardinal direction. I’ve updated Venn’s experiment slightly (his ignored the numbers 8 and 9) – each number from 0-9 rotates the direction of movement by a factor of 36º and takes a step 20 pixels forward.
The above image is the first 1120 decimal places of pi, starting at the gray dot. Created using Processing.