The Binary Ant counts in binary. It does so in a symmetrical way. As an example, the diagram on the right side of the screen shows the binary representation of base ten 37, both above and below the orange line. To start the ant counting, just click on the green flag. To slow down the ant so that it's easier to see how the patterns develop, use the Delay slider to set the delay between each iteration.
While researching Langton's Ant and Dewdney's Tur-mite I found this interesting 'ant' at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Turmite.html. This ant counts in binary! The rules for the Binary Ant is a slight variation of the rules for Langton's Ant. The ant starts at (0, 0), heading north at checks the color of the square it's occupying. If the square is white, the ant paints it black, turns left 90º, and moves forward to the next square. If the square is black, the ant paints it white and moves, without turning, to the next square. That's it! Like Langton's Ant and Dewdney's Tur-mite, the Binary Ant is a very simple example of what's called in Computer Science, a Turing Machine. A Turing Machine is an abstract representation of a computer. In theory, a Turing Machine can be designed to compute anything a real computer can compute.Alan Turing, the great english mathematician and mathematician, is considered by most to be the Father of Computer Science. His Turing machines helped defined what is computable! Search on the Halting Problem for more information about Turing Machines.
