Variation based on a theme by dwesti

[DavidM]

After watching the animation resulting from dwesti's "bouncing line" program, I became curious as to what would happen if the lines were simply drawn and left intact instead of clearing them after a few steps. I commented out the "clearing" part of the program and ran it to see what would happen.

The result based on the parameters set up in dwesti's program yields this image:


At first glance, it's not particularly compelling. Closer inspection, though, shows a symmetric pattern is trying to emerge from the chaos. Like any good art, it invites an extended look.

This prompted me to experiment a bit more with some variations to see what would happen with various tweaks of the drawing parameters. I opted to target a 50g instead of the 48 series in order to use the bigger display. I realized that I'd have a bit more flexibility if I changed the boundary rules to check for <0 and >max instead of requiring the endpoint values to exactly match those values. This allowed me to generalize the input a bit more.

The attached program (DrawLines) runs on a 50g and takes a single argument: a list containing 9 numbers. The numbers (in order of occurrence) represent the following:

1: X1
2: Y1
3: X2
4: Y2
5: DX1
6: DY1
7: DX2
8: DY2
9: iterations

The first four arguments define the endpoints of the first line drawn. The next four arguments define the amount of offset applied to each corresponding value for the endpoints at each iteration. When an endpoint "hits" a border, the offset value is negated so that the offset is reversed for subsequent steps. The offset value is only changed when the new X/Y value would go beyond the image border, hence the bouncing effect seen in the animation. The last argument is simply a count of the lines to be drawn.

As you might expect, some of the resulting patterns aren't very interesting... simple horizontal or vertical lines, random "mashups" of lines, disconnected lines in simple patterns, etc. In other cases, the results were just the opposite. The patterns produced are sometimes amazingly artistic, even for the low resolution display on the calculator. Sometimes the final result isn't very interesting, but the animation of lines being drawn is artistic in its own way.

Here's some samples of the results obtained for the given arguments:

{ 18 60 36 18 18 -6 18 -6 750 }


{ 30 64 36 32 6 -8 6 -8 750 }


{ 39 54 78 45 13 9 13 -9 750 }



  DrawLines.zip (Size: 1.72 KB / Downloads: 5)