Experimenting with NetLogo

by Chadwick Wood
March 23rd, 2010

My friend Matthew has repeatedly told me that I should try out NetLogo to aid me in my experiments with cellular automata (such as Glory Math), and a couple of days ago, I finally took his advice. Man, he was right.

I think I downloaded it somewhere around 4pm. I stopped using it and went to bed around 2am. The following is part of what I have to show for it. I started with the Vants model (one of the many models that comes with NetLogo), and experimented from there, both with the behavior of the agents, and the color mapping, until I got something that I found visually interesting.

Basically, this model makes a bunch of little guys that run around in circles. Most of the time they like to stick to the same general area, but occasionally they get inspired and bolt off to new territory. Along the way, they leave trails that light up the more they are traversed.

Here's the NetLogo source file so that you can poke around yourself. Hope you like it. And, here's a time-lapse rendering of the model in action: