Turmite

A simple N-state N-color Turing machine that operates on a grid of cells, and follows a custom set of rules every tick of a clock.

Make your own Turmite

To create a turmite, a rule must be made and specified by a curly-bracketed table of n_states rows by n_colors columns, consisting of triples {A,B,C} where A is the new color to write [0,1,2,...,(n_colors-1)], B is the direction(s) for the turmite to turn [1=forward, 2=right, 4=u-turn, 8=left], and C is the new state to adopt [0,1,2,...,(n_states-1)].

For example, the fibonacci turmite, has a rule definition {{{1,8,1},{1,8,1}},{{1,2,1},{0,1,0}}}, consisting of two states, two colors, and four triplets. The particular triple is selected based on the current state and current color. The {1,8,1} triple therefore states that the color should change to 1, turn left (8), and adopt state 1 before moving.

Arguments

If no rule or color is given, then both will be selected at random. You can find a list of pre-defined rules here.

$ turmite -h
Usage: turmite [options] ...
Options:
  -h, --help             Display help information
  -w, --wrap             Wrap turmite around window edges
  -r, --rule=<rule>      Specify the turn rule
  -d, --delay=<delay>    Seconds between turmite steps
  -c, --color=<color>    Primary color of the turmite
  -s, --scale=<scale>    Size of each cell
  -o, --offset=<offset>  Spacing between cells
  -x, --width=<width>    Window width in pixels
  -y, --height=<height>  Window height in pixels

Requirements

Visualization is preformed by the SFML library.