Stepas Toliautas
Academic website
Recently I was asked to translate a poem by US poet David Wagoner:
Speeding
My friends and I wanted to drive fast
Faster to floor the pedal and go roaring
Through stop signs and blind corners our eyes half-stuck
On the needle over the limit throttling the night (…)
“Don’t even know whose bed I’m in…”
The (pseudo)code below generates a number of points in a plane or, simply put, a picture:
Goals = [(0, 0), (1, 0), (0.5, sqrt(3)/2)];
curr = random(Goals);
for i = 1:N
dest = random(Goals);
next = 1/2 * (curr + dest);
curr = next;
The process is defined by a set of goals (Goals), a single rule (move half-way (1/2) to a chosen goal) and chance (random()). Can you predict how the picture of N points will look?