Sometimes a bug turns out to be more interesting than the original intended result.
The above image was supposed to be a simple moving-sinewave test of bit blitting (moving most of the display and just drawing one new pixel per frame, to produce a rolling display.) Something clearly went wrong and somehow created a feedback-loop cellular automaton.
I did not expect to see a Sierpinski gasket here — but this actually isn’t the first time I’ve come across one unexpectedly. Back in high school, I wrote a program to draw the Sierpinski gasket on an HP plotter a friend had given me. That worked well enough (I think I still have the plot somewhere), but I didn’t expect the unrelated cellular automata I was playing with at the same time (on a different computer, outputting to a printer) to also draw it — outwardly fractal instead of inward.
It’s a pattern that seems likely to emerge from any of several different processes (I know of at least four ways of making this now, once I figure out what is going on with this latest version). Even Nature has joined in…
(Image from Wikipedia)
(The title is a play on and homage to John Archibald Wheeler’s “It from Bit” idea.)
