The Nature of Code: Simulating Natural Systems with Processing

Acknowledgments

A.1 A little bit of history

A.2 Kickstarter

Preface

P.1 What is this book?

P.2 A word about Processing

P.3 What do you need to know?

P.4 What are you using to read this book?

P.5 The “story” of this book

P.6 This book as a syllabus

P.7 The Ecosystem Project

P.8 Where do I find the code online and submit feedback?

Introduction

I.1 Random Walks

I.2 The Random Walker Class

I.3 Probability and Non-Uniform Distributions

I.4 A Normal Distribution of Random Numbers

I.5 A Custom Distribution of Random Numbers

I.6 Perlin Noise (A Smoother Approach)

I.7 Onward

Chapter 1. Vectors

1.1 Vectors, You Complete Me

1.2 Vectors for Processing Programmers

1.3 Vector Addition

1.4 More Vector Math

1.5 Vector Magnitude

1.6 Normalizing Vectors

1.7 Vector Motion: Velocity

1.8 Vector Motion: Acceleration

1.9 Static vs. Non-Static Functions

1.10 Interactivity with Acceleration

Chapter 2. Forces

2.1 Forces and Newton’s Laws of Motion

2.2 Forces and Processing—Newton’s Second Law as a Function

2.3 Force Accumulation

2.4 Dealing with Mass

2.5 Creating Forces

2.6 Gravity on Earth and Modeling a Force

2.7 Friction

2.8 Air and Fluid Resistance

2.9 Gravitational Attraction

2.10 Everything Attracts (or Repels) Everything

Chapter 3. Oscillation

3.1 Angles

3.2 Angular Motion

3.3 Trigonometry

3.4 Pointing in the Direction of Movement

3.5 Polar vs. Cartesian Coordinates

3.6 Oscillation Amplitude and Period

3.7 Oscillation with Angular Velocity

3.8 Waves

3.9 Trigonometry and Forces: The Pendulum

3.10 Spring Forces

Chapter 4. Particle Systems

4.1 Why We Need Particle Systems

4.2 A Single Particle

4.3 The ArrayList

4.4 The Particle System Class

4.5 A System of Systems

4.6 Inheritance and Polymorphism: An Introduction

4.7 Inheritance Basics

4.8 Particles with Inheritance

4.9 Polymorphism Basics

4.10 Particle Systems with Polymorphism

4.11 Particle Systems with Forces

4.12 Particle Systems with Repellers

4.13 Image Textures and Additive Blending

Chapter 5. Physics Libraries

5.1 What Is Box2D and When Is It Useful?

5.2 Getting Box2D in Processing

5.3 Box2D Basics

5.4 Living in a Box2D World

5.5 Building a Box2D Body

5.6 Three’s Company: Bodies and Shapes and Fixtures

5.7 Box2D and Processing: Reunited and It Feels So Good

5.8 Fixed Box2D Objects

5.9 A Curvy Boundary

5.10 Complex Forms

5.11 Feeling Attached—Box2D Joints

5.12 Bringing It All Back Home to Forces

5.13 Collision Events

5.14 A Brief Interlude—Integration Methods

5.15 Verlet Physics with toxiclibs

5.16 Particles and Springs in toxiclibs

5.17 Putting It All Together: A Simple Interactive Spring

5.18 Connected Systems, Part I: String

5.19 Connected Systems, Part II: Force-Directed Graph

5.20 Attraction and Repulsion Behaviors

Chapter 6. Autonomous Agents

6.1 Forces from Within

6.2 Vehicles and Steering

6.3 The Steering Force

6.4 Arriving Behavior

6.5 Your Own Desires: Desired Velocity

6.6 Flow Fields

6.7 The Dot Product

6.8 Path Following

6.9 Path Following with Multiple Segments

6.10 Complex Systems

6.11 Group Behaviors (or: Let’s not run into each other)

6.12 Combinations

6.13 Flocking

6.14 Algorithmic Efficiency (or: Why does my $@(*%! run so slowly?)

6.15 A Few Last Notes: Optimization Tricks

Chapter 7. Cellular Automata

7.1 What Is a Cellular Automaton?

7.2 Elementary Cellular Automata

7.3 How to Program an Elementary CA

7.4 Drawing an Elementary CA

7.5 Wolfram Classification

7.6 The Game of Life

7.7 Programming the Game of Life

7.8 Object-Oriented Cells

7.9 Variations of Traditional CA

Chapter 8. Fractals

8.1 What Is a Fractal?

8.2 Recursion

8.3 The Cantor Set with a Recursive Function

8.4 The Koch Curve and the ArrayList Technique

8.5 Trees

8.6 L-systems

Chapter 9. The Evolution of Code

9.1 Genetic Algorithms: Inspired by Actual Events

9.2 Why Use Genetic Algorithms?

9.3 Darwinian Natural Selection

9.4 The Genetic Algorithm, Part I: Creating a Population

9.5 The Genetic Algorithm, Part II: Selection

9.6 The Genetic Algorithm, Part III: Reproduction

9.7 Code for Creating the Population

9.8 Genetic Algorithms: Putting It All Together

9.9 Genetic Algorithms: Make Them Your Own

9.10 Evolving Forces: Smart Rockets

9.11 Smart Rockets: Putting It All Together

9.12 Interactive Selection

9.13 Ecosystem Simulation

Chapter 10. Neural Networks

10.1 Artificial Neural Networks: Introduction and Application

10.2 The Perceptron

10.3 Simple Pattern Recognition Using a Perceptron

10.4 Coding the Perceptron

10.5 A Steering Perceptron

10.6 It’s a “Network,” Remember?

10.7 Neural Network Diagrams

10.8 Animating Feed Forward

Further Reading

Books

Papers and Articles

Index