Langton's Ant

Simon Marquis

About this game

Langton's Ant is actually a two-dimensional cell automaton that evolves by following very simple rules.
It was invented by scientist Christopher Langton in 1986 and helped to highlight an example of emergent behavior.

The two basic rules are:
¤ If the ant is on a black square, it turns right, changes the color to white and moves forward
¤ If the ant is on a white square, it turns left, changes the color to black and moves forward


These simple rules lead to a surprising behavior of the ant:
The ant builds a road that repeat indefinitely


Here are the main features of my implementation:

¤ Changing the speed
¤ Changing the size of the world
¤ Changing the background color
¤ Changin the rules:
- 35 predefined rules
- create your own rules
¤ Creation of multiple states automatons
¤ Add as many ant as you want, simply by touching the screen!

There are many extensions (several colors, states, etc.) but it's up to you to discover them.

Ratings and reviews

Expert mode doesn't work and sometimes it crashes, but other than that it's pretty much perfect. I've never seen a langtons ant program more advanced and customizable than this.

Great app, but it hasn't been updated since 2014 and it crashes when trying to edit expert rules, and there is no way to change a tiles state around the ant :(

great app! I would prefer of the time slider(which currently returns exponential values) had a logarithmic scale instead of a linear scale.

What's new

Update icons