(blows flute)

Hello, and welcome to a 2018

holiday coding challenge, snowflakes!

So, I was perusing the internet last night,

and I found this page, I think my search term was like,

Brownian motion snowflake fractal,

and I found this page, it's from a website

called Code Golf that has a lot of different

coding challenges on it.

I think the idea of the challenge is to write

the shortest amount of code to create this kind of effect.

I am not going to attempt that,

I'm probably going to write the longest amount of code

to make this kind of effect, but my goal

is to try to make a snowflake pattern like this.

Now, if you read over this webpage, and there's a

few diff, this is an example that was made in Mathematica,

which I don't understand at all.

But the algorithm that's described here is, you can,

here that it's a Brownian tree on an integer lattice,

that sounds so fancy!

The idea is, if you just think about a number line,

or the x-axis of any coordinate system,

and I were to start with a point back here,

and I were just to allow that point

to, like, randomly move around,

do a random walk, so to speak,

random walk,

and at some point I would have to tell it to stop.

So maybe, maybe what I would do,

is I would tell it to stop if it got to, like, over here.

(laughter)

The path, maybe this is the 0, 0 coordinate.

If it got to here it should stop.

And then I'm going to start another one.

And I'm going to let that one do a random walk.

Now, it's going to stop also if it gets to

either past here, or if it touches another previous,

I'll call these particles.

And this, by the way, is basically an algorithm called

Diffusion Limited Aggregation.

And this is actually something that

I have done previously in a coding challenge.

I'll pull up that page right here.

You can, I'm mostly going to implement the exact same thing.

But you can see you'll get this branching pattern.

So here, the dot, there's one dot

that starts at the center

and everything kind of branches out from there.

And we could use a recursive tree structure.

There's all sorts of kinds of way

we could create this branching pattern.

But what's interesting about this,

how can we make a snowflake?

Well, I don't really know.

I'm not, no expert on the actual science of snowflakes,

but if you've looked at most snowflakes' designs,

they are in a hexagonal pattern.

We can think of that as a bunch of,

like, triangular slices.

Slices of a pizza pie right here, right.

So if I were to kind of constrain

this branching to within this sort of

half of this slice, like right here,

then what I could do is I could take this,

I could reflect it on the other side,

which would give it some symmetry,

and then rotate it also around six times,

and I think, I'm pretty sure, that's what that is happening

in that animation that I showed in the beginning.

So this is what I'm going to attempt to do.

I'm sure, I'm not sure, but I expect

there are lots of creative possibilities

with color, and improving the algorithm,

and size, and rendering that you could do

from watching this.

So my hope is that we will now be filled

with a world of code made snowflakes.

But let's start this and see.

It's similar to probably also to, like,

what you would do to make a kaleidoscope program I think.

So let's start trying to do this.

I'm going to do this in Processing,

which is a Java based programming environment.

This is, by the way, being recorded during a fundraiser.

You can go to processingfoundation.org/support

to make a donation to the non-profit Processing.

And I will also release a JavaScript version

in p5.js that you can also use

to make this thing happen in the browser.

Alright, so the first thing that I want to do

is I just want to make a particle.

Oh I guess I need to have a class.

(laughter)

So let's make a class called particle.

Do I dare use p-vectors?

Let's try to be simple for a little bit

here for a second.

Let's start without p-vectors

and let's just make the particle have

an x and a y,

and I'm going to say the particle

is going to start at some other x and y,

so this is a, this is a class

from which I'm going to make particle objects,

and this is the class's constructor

that is going to receive an x and a y

and create the particle there.

I probably actually don't,

I could've just used a single vector actually,

but that's fine.

Let's make a particle class.

And then what I'm going to do is

I'm going to write a function called,

like, update

and I'm going to say x equals,

so I'm going to do a really simple random walk,

which it's all, I'm going to make the particle,

I'm going to start it this way.

I probably want to, like, start the particle

somewhere around here,

and then have it randomly walk in this direction

to stay within the slice,

but just for simplicity's sake,

let's start it right here right now

and have it randomly go this way.

I'm going to say x equals,

x minus equals one,

y plus equals some random number

between negative one and one, alright.

So let's do that.

And then let's make a particle.

I'm going to call it current.

And let's say size 600 600 for the window,

and I'm going to make a new particle,

which is going to start at 600 comma zero,

and I'm going to say background zero.

Current dot update.

And then let's also write a function like show.

So, I'm going to write a function called show

and let's just draw this as, it'll be white

with a white outline

and this should probably have a size too.

Let's give it a radius

and then I can just set that

always to be, like, three.

I don't know, I'm making this up.

Ellipse, x comma y

r times two

r times two

because the radius is, the diameter is the radius times two.

Alright, so now if I were to say,

oh, this should be good.

Oh there it is.

There it is, it's wandering around up there.

Okay, so one thing I want to do

is I really, this is going to work much better,

if everything can be relative to the center.

So I'm going to translate zero zero to the center.

Let's do that.

Translate width divided by two,

height divided by two.

And then the particle should actually start

at width divided by two

'cause it's that far out.

It could start further out, but,

and now we can see, there it is.

There's my particle.

Go, go particle.

You can do it.

You can make it to the center.

Okay, it's just going to keep going,

so there's, I need some way of telling it to stop.

(laughter)

So, let's say if current dot finished,

then what I want is I want to have a big array,

I mean, I could just not erase the,

I could render it to, like,

a separate graphics object or something,

but let's, this'll be the less efficient way,

but let's make an array list

that is full of particles.

Let's call this the snowflake.

Snowflake equals new, what was I saying,

array list.

New array list of particles,

and then if it's finished

I'm going to say snowflake dot add

the current particle,

and then I should remake the current particle again,

like I should make a new current particle.

And then I also should for every particle p in snowflake,

I should show them all.

So the idea here is that I have this particle wandering.

As soon as it's done it gets added to the list

and a new one starts wandering.

So I need to implement this finished function.

As you can see this read squiggly is like

I don't know what that is.

What does it mean for a particle to be finished?

And I can say boolean finished

'cause I want this function to return a boolean variable.

I mean, yeah, a boolean value, true or false.

Return x is less than zero.

So it's finished when x is less than zero.

Obviously I'm going to have to get

more sophisticated than that,

but that will be a good start.

So let's see here.

Go particle, go.

Go particle, go.

Go particle, go, stop.

Go particle, go.

Go particle, go.

Go particle, go.

Go particle, stop.

Okay, so that's good.

This is kind of working.

I actually, I really kind of want to reflect,

do the kaleidoscope thing now so we always see that.

Oh that'll be so fun.

So the particle is finished

if also, if it's, if it's past zero

or if intersects another particle.

So, I guess I could say, if current is finished

or current intersects snowflake, the existing.

So now I need to write also

another function called boolean intersects

and does it intersect,

the snowflake is just an array list, right.

(groans)

A particular snowflake.

And then let's just put a return false here for a second,

make sure this is still working.

So it's still working, it's never going to stop.

But now it will also, if, okay,

I'm thinking, I'm thinking,

it's so hard to talk and code.

If it intersects itself, like,

I have to just check every other snowflake against it

and current is not currently in the snowflake array

so I don't have to check it against itself.

So, I'm going to assume a result,

I'm going to assume it's not intersecting anything.

Then I'm going to check everything

for particle s in snowflake

if, and then I just need to get the distance

between s x, s y, and this x, and this dot y.

By the way, I should mention I have this thing

(upbeat music)

where I always forget the this dot, this dot,

but actually in Java, the this dot is assumed,

but in this case I kind of felt like

I wanted to put it in there,

'cause I want the distance between s dot x

and this dot x, this dot y,

but I don't actually need it.

So that's what I'm doing.

And then I'mma say if the distance is less than

the radius times two also,

then result equals true.