Force Knots

A new generative experiment is just out of the oven. Here’s the recipe: a swarm of autonomous particles and some hidden attractors that exert different kinds of influence on them. The force fields of the attractors overlap, so particles are under several effects at once. In those intersections is where the most interesting configurations arise.

Simple, huh? There are at the moment 14 kinds of attractors doing different things – from applying a random force at each step to creating swirls. I suppose I could still come up with more possibilities, but I think this will do for now.

When the program starts, they are randomly assigned a type, a size, and a position on the screen. That’s the ‘hidden structure’ that soon becomes visible through the flow of the particles under its influence. Each type of attractor is identified by a different color, and the particles are painted in accordance with the forces they are under at the moment.

You are invited to play with the Processing applet. Mouse over to reveal the position and size of attractors, and drag the centers to move them around. You can also ‘paint’ with a stream of particles by clicking and dragging anywhere else. This is a complete set of instructions:

Key controls:
SPACE => Pause the animation
t => Recreate attractors and reset all particles
r => Reset all particles

Mouse actions:
CLICK AND DRAG to paint
DRAG attractor centers to move them
HOVER to reveal attractors under mouse position