Exponentially Replicating Langton's Ants

Using bitluni's ESP32 VGA board to display the year 2020 as a bitmap being eaten by Langton's Ants which replicate expontentially

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Description

Langton's Ant is a simple type of cellular automaton that operates on a 2D grid of binary cells, modifying it according a very simple rules that are straightforward to program. I've modified the basic behaviour of the Ant so that it will also replicate after walking a few hundred steps. This very quickly leads to an exponential explosion of Ants walking all over the bitmap, flipping the colours of each pixel and eventually completely obliterating the year 2020. This is representative of how the entire went for most people - lives and plans wrecked by a tiny bag of chemistry replicating exponentially out of control.

Details

This projects uses the ESP32 VGA board from Bitluni. Any VGA capable display can be used. I'm using a small and fairly inexpensive VGA/HDMI LCD display that was bought from Amazon. The VGA board plugs into an ESP32 D1 Mini development board (Wemos or clone).

Each Langton's Ant replicates after walking about 200 steps. The total number of ants is limited to 4096. The Ants apply their cellular automaton rules according to whether the pixel at their current location is black or not-black. Each Ant is assigned one of 12 colours to use when flipping the value of a black pixel. This makes it a bit easier to track where each Ant is wandering during the early generations.