Langton’s ant

Langton’s ant simulation made in C using SDL2.

Description

Simple single-source simulation of langton’s ant, made in under 500 lines of C.

Some of the main features:

• Custom grid size and delay at runtime.
• Very easy to modify color palette with no size limit. Supports 4 possible rotations when stepping on each color. Modified at compile-time.
• Unlimited number of ants at runtime, spawned by clicking on the grid.
• Grid overlay with g.
• Single stepping with Left arrow or automatic stepping with Space.
• Easily customizable by changing macros inside the source.

Building

Clone the repository and run make. Make sure you have SDL2 installed.

$ git clone https://github.com/8dcc/langtons-ant
$ cd langtons-ant
$ make
...

Usage

You can specify the width, height and delay at runtime.

$ ./langtons-ant
Grid size: 100x100
Cell size: 5 px
Delay: 10 ms

Step: 536

$ ./langtons-ant 50 20 200
Grid size: 50x20
Cell size: 5 px
Delay: 200 ms

Step: 231

You can use the following keys:

Key	Description
q	Quit the program.
ESC	Same as q.
g	Toggle grid overlay.
Left Arrow	Single step.
Space	Toggle auto-stepping.
Up Arrow	Increase number of steps per frame when auto-stepping.
Down Arrow	Decrease number of steps per frame when auto-stepping.
Left Click	Add ant at the specified position.
Right Click	Remove ant at the specified position.

Screenshots

Different ants with default color palette:

Single ant with 9 color palette and custom rotations: