The model uses a medium distance, forward looking visual field and models each firefly as a resettable pacemaker. Each firefly has its own flash frequency and its own time delay between flash initiation, by the brain, and generation, by the flash organ. Rather than growing a tree, however, the agents here generate a snowflake . Agents spawn other agents in order to draw the branches of the snowflake simultaneously. In another illustration of the use of agents, I invented an impossible pinball game.
Bumpers are green while balls are red.
Colliding balls annihilate one another while bumpers cause balls to split, one traveling in each direction orthogonal to the original. This configuration eventually becomes stable, but its fun to watch for a short while. The hodgepodge machine , described in Dewdney's Computer Recreations column in the August 1988 issue of Scientific American, qualitatively models heterogeneous catalytic reactions. Catalytic converters, in which carbon monoxide and oxygen are catalyzed by palladium crystallites to form carbon dioxide, are an example. The cell color represents the state of the catalyst.