Week 1 Assignment – Self-Avoiding Walk

For this week’s assignment, I chose to make a random self-avoiding walker. First, I started by looking at the P5JS example of it and took inspiration from it.

But it wasn’t enough. So, I have started looking for ways to make the walk not get stuck. For that, I have modified  the approach to continuously attempt to find a path by using a backtracking method. It took me a few tries, but I have eventually got there.

After everything, I have added the function to change colors everytime it changes directions. This was not as hard because we have tried it in class.

 

 

let spacing = 20;
let cols, rows;
let x, y;
let grid;
let allOptions = [
  { dx: 0, dy: 1 },
  { dx: 1, dy: 0 },
  { dx: 0, dy: -1 },
  { dx: -1, dy: 0 },
];
let stack = [];
let currentColor;

function setup() {
  createCanvas(400, 400);
  cols = width / spacing;
  rows = height / spacing;
  x = floor(cols / 2);
  y = floor(rows / 2);
  background(51);
  grid = Array.from({ length: cols }, () => Array(rows).fill(false));
  grid[x][y] = true;
  stack.push([x, y]);
  currentColor = pastelColor();
}

function draw() {
  stroke(currentColor);
  strokeWeight(spacing * 0.5);
  point(x * spacing, y * spacing);

  let options = allOptions.filter((option) =>
    isValid(x + option.dx, y + option.dy)
  );

  if (options.length > 0) {
    let step = random(options);
    strokeWeight(1);
    stroke(currentColor);
    line(
      x * spacing,
      y * spacing,
      (x + step.dx) * spacing,
      (y + step.dy) * spacing
    );

    x += step.dx;
    y += step.dy;
    grid[x][y] = true;
    stack.push([x, y]);
    currentColor = pastelColor();
  } else {
    if (stack.length > 1) {
      stack.pop();
      [x, y] = stack[stack.length - 1];
    } else {
      noLoop();
    }
  }
}

function isValid(i, j) {
  return grid[i]?.[j] === false && i >= 0 && i < cols && j >= 0 && j < rows;
}

function pastelColor() {
  return color(random(200, 255), random(200, 255), random(200, 255));
}

For the future, I think that I would like to make it more complex. Maybe I can make two of them and make it collide and when they do something happens. Until then, I am pretty pleased with the outcome