Genuary 2021 Day 15 "Other People's Rules"

 The actual prompt as written:

Let someone else decide the general rules of your piece.

The way I implemented that was to make a Google Docs survey form, ask people on twitter to choose random LOGO-style commands (left, right, forward, reverse) from a list. Also, I prompted for angles and distances. There was also a potential for a wild GOTO, for extra fun.

I got a total of 11 responses, including one from myself, so 10 "someone else"s, which feels like it's good enough.

I also had prompted for a seed string. I used these seed strings to generate "programs", sequences of 12-24 instructions.

I then proceeded to run these programs 25 times, stopping them after 100 steps, or if they got outside their little fenced off portion of the page.

My first attempt to draw this, I had an error where most of the programs would terminate early, thinking they had already crossed their fence, so I rewrote the rule generation to do a move then a turn OR a turn then a move OR a goto. I think this led to more natural, flowing walks, as opposed to just turning in place 100 times.

Tools Used: AxiDraw, DrawSVG, Google Docs Forms

Languages Used: Python

Development Time: ~90 minutes

Drawing Time: ~2 minutes

What's Generative Here: I got a bunch of rule pieces, as well as seed strings. Each seed string was used to compose rules from the submitted entries. I then ran a custom interpreter to execute those rules in a simple turtle graphics environment.