Author: maa9782

Concept

My concept is “Nervous Fireflies” that implements a Levy Flight. Most of the time, the firefly hovers in a small area (small steps), but occasionally it gets startled and zooms to a new location (a very large step).

To visualize this, I mapped the “step size” to the size of the circle. When it’s hovering, it is a tiny dot. When it zooms, it expands into a large burst of light.

Code Highlight

I am proud of this section because it creates the Lévy Flight behavior without using complicated math formulas. I simply used random(100) like rolling a 100-sided die. If I roll a 1 (a 1% chance), the firefly takes a huge jump. Otherwise, it takes a tiny step.

I was also proud of the trigonometry part which is particularly thematic in situations where you want to convert an angle into cartesian coordinates.

step() {
    // CHOOSE DIRECTION
    let angle = random(TWO_PI);

    // CHOOSE DISTANCE (The Lévy Flight Logic)
    // Pick a random number between 0 and 100
    let r = random(100);

    // 2% chance of a BIG jump
    if (r < 2) {
      this.currentStepSize = random(50, 150);
    } 
    // 98% chance of a small step
    else {
      this.currentStepSize = random(2, 5);
    }

    // MOVE
    // convert angle/distance into X and Y
    let xStep = cos(angle) * this.currentStepSize;
    let yStep = sin(angle) * this.currentStepSize;
    
    this.x += xStep;
    this.y += yStep;

 

Reflection & Future Improvements

I realized that “random” doesn’t have to mean “even.” By checking if random(100) < 2, I was able to create a behavior that feels much more organic and alive than just moving randomly every frame.

For the future, I could implement:

Mouse Interaction: I want to make the firefly scared of the mouse, so if the mouse gets too close, it forces a “big jump” immediately.

Interaction Between Fireflies: Right now, the fireflies behave in isolation. It would be cool to have fireflies interact with one another using object to object communication.

It really blew my mind to read about how scientists usually try to figure things out by breaking them into tiny pieces like atoms or cells. The author explains that you can study a single ant all you want but you will never understand how the whole colony works just by looking at that one bug. It makes me think that the connections between things are actually more important than the things themselves. I used to think science was just about memorizing parts of a system but this chapter makes it seem like the real secret is seeing how simple stuff comes together to make complex patterns.

I also think it is super interesting how the book compares nature to a computer program. It is weird to realize that totally different subjects like biology and physics are actually similar because they both follow these basic rules of logic. The idea that nature is actually kind of lazy and reuses the same simple tricks for everything from snowflakes to economic markets is a really cool way to look at the world. It makes me feel like everything is connected through these hidden patterns that we can finally see now that we have computers to simulate them.