Hello people who, unlike myself, understand maths. It has always baffled me how, after that “chaos” period (which, in the end, isn’t chaos at all really), the ant starts repeating the same pattern forever. This might be a nonsensical question but I don’t know how else to put it, “why” does that happen?
(Also, stuff like Langton’s ant and Conway’s game of life makes me think there really isn’t anything at all like “chaos”, just patterns we are too dumb to understand.)
In: Biology
You can look at Langton’s ant as a relatively good chaos generator with one fatal flaw: if you put in on the “first step” of the highway, it’ll continue building the highway and suddenly stops producing chaos and starts producing something that repeats itsself.
Because the ant produces good chaos before it is on the “first step of the highway”, it eventually – by “chance” – produces the first step of the highway.
that’s basically what chaos is. a chaotic system is a deterministic system (that is, one where the future is determined by the starting point, e.g. in conway’s game of life the same starting pattern will always get you the same end pattern) that’s so complex it’s hard to predict, despite not being random.
like weather is a chaotic system, if you could see every factor at play in the earth’s weather, you could predict it perfectly, but it’s impossible to do that and even tiny factors can dramatically change the result. langton’s ant is a chaotic system with an attractor. just by virtue of the two rules the ant follows, eventually its seemingly random movements will produce the set of squares that causes it to start the highway.
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