I discovered Langton ants and Turmites a couple of months ago, I guess these are a subset of cellular automata. I was talking with a friend about using them somehow for art somehow (music generation came to mind), is this a topic you might know about and could recommend some resources to get started?
dvgrn|1 year ago
For music generation you'd want to somehow avoid ending up with the music "going boring" when the highway appears... As with a lot of math-inspired art (I guess I'm thinking about Mandelbrot-set colorizations here) the key is going to be in very specific presentation choices -- color choices for still frames or videos, or the specific method of mapping sounds to frames in a Langton's Ant evolution. So you'll just need to have (or develop) tools to try a lot of options and see what looks the most compelling.
Still frames are probably not going to be that interesting -- the fun part about CAs is the predictable-yet-surprising motion, which can be either the usual visual form or converted to sound somehow.
A recent version of Golly ( https://golly.sourceforge.io ) added support for listening to evolving patterns -- see pop-sounds.py / pop-sounds.lua in the Scripts directory. That reduces patterns to a single dimension in an obvious way (just looking at population), ignoring a lot of the 2D complexity. No doubt there are a lot of other possible avenues to explore there.