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])

alife_langton_ant: 入力 → 出力

*The figure is the real output on a synthetic 128×128 input. Left: input, right: output (a non-image return value is shown as the value itself).*

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.

Try it in Studio

The program below has been verified to run (same input as the figure). In Studio's help this block becomes buttons that load and run it on the spot.

alife_langton_ant 0.50 0.50

▸ Load this pipeline  ·  Load & run

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.