# AoC 2017 Day 22: Langton's Ant

### Source: Sporifica Virus

Part 1: Implement a cellular automaton on an infinite grid of . and # pixels such that:

1. Start at (0, 0), facing Up
2. Repeat:
• If the cursor is on . swap it to # and turn Left
• If the cursor is on # swap it to . and turn Right
• Either way, after turning, move forward once

After 10,000 iterations, how many pixels were turned from . to #?

As you might guess from the title of this post, this is Langton's Ant.

The problem statement is a bit short since I’ve already solved this problem back in 2014 with a whole pile of cool animations. Head back that way if you want to see another take on this problem in Racket.

First, we want to decide on a representation and load in the initial data. Since the grid that we’re working on can (and will) grow indefinitely, we want something that doesn’t have to resize to do it. For this, I’m going to use a set of coordinates that contains all of the infected pixels (#). We can assume that any point that isn’t in this set is ..

# Load the initial state, assuming a square; recenter on the center of the data
# . is assumed to be the default state and not stored

size = int(math.sqrt(len(data)))
offset = -(size // 2)

infected = {}

for x in range(size):
for y in range(size):
if data[y * size + x] == '#':
infected.add((x, y))

The code is a bit odd here, since the initial load will start with (0, 0) in the top left, but I want it to be in the center of the input. That’s not really necessary, since the simulation doesn’t care about coordinates, but it will be more consistent.

Also, we’re using the include_comments parameter on lib.input, which I haven’t used before. This is because we’re expecting Python style comments, which start with #. So if a line in the input grid starts with #, that line will be ignored, which isn’t what we want. That took a bit to figure out. 😄

Next, we run the actual simulation:

# Run the simulation
location = (0, 0)
facing = (0, -1)

caused_infection = 0

for tick in range(0, lib.param('iterations')):
infected ^= {location}
if location not in infected:
caused_infection += 1

facing = lib.vector2_rotate(facing, 1 if location in infected else 3)

print(f'{caused_infection} new infections')

lib.vector2_rotate is designed for 90° turns:

def vector2_rotate(v, turns_clockwise = True):
(x, y) = v
for i in range(turns_clockwise):
(x, y) = (-y, x)
return (x, y)

Because we have a set, infected ^= {location} says remove the point from infected if it was in it and add it if not (it’s an xor). This works since . always becomes # and vice versa. Finally we update the direction we are facing and our location and continue. It’s nicely elegant.

Part 2: Expand to four state transitions:

• If clean, become weakened and turn left
• If weakened, become infected and do not turn
• If infected, become flagged and turn right
• If flagged, become clean and reverses (turns left twice)

Run the simulation for 10000000 ticks.

The infected set worked well enough when we only had two states, but now that we have four, we really want a dict instead:

state = {}

for x in range(size):
for y in range(size):
if data[y * size + x] != '.':
state[x + offset, y + offset] = data[y * size + x]

We could go ahead and hard code the transitions the same time as we did last time, but instead we should go ahead and make our code flexible enough to handle any possible combinations of transitions1. Specifically, I will allow the user to specify transitions on the command line as such:

# Load the transition table
# Map of input -> (output, # turns clockwise)
predefined_transitions = {
'default': '#>. .>>>#',
'evolved': '.>>>W W# #>F F>>.',
}
mode = lib.param('mode')
mode = predefined_transitions.get(mode, mode)

Rules are space separated. Each rule has the input character first, the output character last, and a number of > equal to how many times you would turn right. So the rules from above become2:

Input Output Turn Code
clean weakened left .>>>W
weakened infected W#
infected flagged right #>F
flagged clean reverse F>>.

Next, we have to update the simulation to handle the new transitions:

caused_infection = 0

for tick in range(0, lib.param('iterations')):
current = state.get(location, '.')
output, turns = transitions.get(current, (current, 0))

if output == '.':
del state[location]
else:
state[location] = output

facing = lib.vector2_rotate(facing, turns)

if output == '#':
caused_infection += 1

print(f'{caused_infection} new infections')

It’s really not that much worse. The if output == '.' line is used since we assume the default state is ., so we don’t use as much memory storing any locations that were non-clean and became clean later.

I could easily generate images from this using the same generate_image I’ve used a few times recently, but I made a pile of them already for my last post on Langton’s Ants. Go look at those. 😄

\$ python3 run-all.py day-22

day-22  python3 langtons-ant.py input.txt --iterations 10000    0.1982278823852539      5266 new infections
day-22  python3 langtons-ant.py input.txt --iterations 10000000 --mode evolved  88.76584982872009       2511895 new infections

Another case that’s slightly longer than the minute I’d like, but it’s close enough for now. If I hard coded the transitions, for example, it would likely run a decent bit more quickly.

1. Over engineering? Who’s over engineering? 😇 [return]
2. Look familiar? That’s the evolved preset. So --mode evolved is equivalent to --mode ".>>>W W# #>F F>>." [return]