Lu Wilson

TODEPOND TIMES: On The Edge

Added 2022-12-22 16:06:43 +0000 UTC

Hello, and welcome back *cough* to another *cough* weekly edition of the...

*cough*

🐸 🟨 TODEPOND TIMES 🟨 🐸

What's new this week?

I caught covid! (again) (*cough*)
So I've been in bed... Let's try that again...

What's new from last week that we haven't talked about yet?

Edge Functions

For the next video, 📕 Define Define (which I'm thinking of renaming), I've been making a bunch of different experiments. I mentioned one of them a few weeks ago: SandLab.

It's a(nother) sand simulation, but this time... cells continually split+merge to try to fit their shapes better.

On the surface, it looks similar to CellPond. But under the hood, the engine works completely differently. Let me explain...

CellPond (like most cellular automatons) works by following rules. These rules work by looking at the state of cells in the world. For example: "If a yellow cell (sand) is above a black cell (air), swap their colours."

SandLab also works by following rules. But this time, they work by looking at the state of the edges in between cells. For example: "If the bottom edge of a yellow cell (sand) is touching the top edge of a black cell (air), swap their colours."

This doesn't sound like much, but it allows you to have much more flexibility over the rules you make. And I feel like it's the 'next step' forwards from CellPond.

All Talk

I'm doing a talk! On the 2nd February 2023, I'm going to be one of two speakers at the London Creative Coding Meetup. If you're within reach, please do come and watch (there are currently 27 spots left)! I've been told that the event might be livestreamed too.

The event kicks off Peckham Digital, which is a festival of creating computing. And I'm hoping to show people some of the fun of spatial programming! I'll show some similar things to my previous Future of Coding talk, but I want to show some newer things too.

Talking of talking... I've made a recent move from twitter to mastodon. I've been really pleasantly surprised by how well it's going! Come and join us there if you'd like to see daily updates of what I'm making for the video!

Anyway, thank you so much for all your help and support! I can't believe I'm now doing multiple talks about these projects. That's all thanks to you! Have a really great week - see you next time! 🟨 🐸 🟨