A terrific programmer and artist toxi has written up some thoughts about “Code (with a capital C)” and Processing. The post inspired a great deal of discussion on the Processing forum as well as a second post on toxi’s blog.

I was about to post some of my thoughts on the forum and here, but realized, eh, what do I really know. Who better to respond and discuss this topic than those in my course nature of code class? So, well, I made it “homework. . . ” Post away! (use the comments here to leave your response, but feel free to post to the Processing forum as well.)

Cellular Automata 1D - Stephen Wolfram’s favourite topic.

Vehicles - Valentino Braitenberg’s experiment of synthetic psychology.

The Game of Life - John Conway’s Game of Life

Mandelbrot Set - Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractal geometry.

Vector Field - Moving particles on a vector field.

Differential Steering - An algorithm of differential steering. The car will either spin, curve, or forward depending on its wheels’ speed.

Collinearity - Calculate whether a number of points are on a straight line.

Golden Ratio - Fractal-like division of space using the golden ratio.

Image Blur - Image blurring using convolution technique.

Bezier Curve - Find points and tangents on a bezier curve. Drag the white squares to move the curve.

Circle Intersection - Calculate the intersection points of 2 circles.

Everyone loves a contest.

In an effort to get some action going on in my shiny new forum, I’ve decided to try out a bit of bribery:

If you sign up for an account (click on ‘create new account’ in the side menu) and post at least one real topic or reply to the forums between now and February 14th, I’ll enter you into the contest. If you are the lucky user I draw out of my digital hat on Valentine’s Day, I’ll send you a 18″x36″ print of my L-system flame.tree or flower.tree (your choice!) The prints are real pretty, limited edition, and are worth $150.