alife_langton_ant — 2D artificial-life op

Data kinds: imageimage

Call: fullseye.apply(img, "alife_langton_ant", a=0.5, b=0.5) (the 2-D model is one image plus two scalar knobs a,b∈[0,1])

Usage

Langton's ant (turmite) walking the thresholded image lattice.

Reimplements the two-colour turmite of C. G. Langton, "Studying artificial

life with cellular automata", Physica D 22, 120-149 (1986). Cell colours are

the 0.5-threshold of the image. A single ant starts at the grid centre and,

at every step, applies the RL rule:

• on a white (0) cell: turn 90 degrees right, flip the cell to 1,

step forward one cell;

• on a black (1) cell: turn 90 degrees left, flip the cell to 0,

step forward one cell.

Movement wraps toroidally. Because every visit flips the cell it stands on,

starting from an all-white lattice a cell is black exactly when the ant has

visited it an odd number of times.

`a sets the number of steps N = 1 + int(400a); b` selects the initial

heading (up / right / down / left) which mirrors/rotates the whole

trajectory. Returns the final {0,1} colour field.

Detailed usage guide

gallery2d_physics_alife_3d family guide

References (sample data, literature)

• Sample-data catalog (download URLs / licences) — 2-D uses skimage.data (BSD/public domain) plus synthetic images; 3-D lists download URLs for real data sources (Stanford, PDS, …).

• Operator provenance and references — the sources of the research/methods this op family came from.

• The canonical algorithm (author, year) and its uses are named in the family usage guide above.

Runnable examples (verified samples that actually call this op)

gallery2d_physics_alife_3dpy -3.11 examples/gallery2d_physics_alife_3d.py

Ops the type connects to (they accept image as input)

identity · gaussian · mean_box · bilateral · unsharp · median · min_filter · max_filter

Same category (artificial-life)

alife_gray_scott · alife_turing · alife_life_step · alife_cyclic_ca · alife_perona_malik · alife_curvature_flow · alife_dla · alife_reaction_bz


*Provenance: ops.py — 2D operator registry. This per-op note is generated by tools/opdocs.py md (do not hand-edit).*

© 2026 Kazufumi Furuse — Fullseye operator documentation. Licensed under Apache-2.0.