Nature of Code, Week 1

This semester I’m taking Nature of Code, which is a class taught by Dan Shiffman that explores the “evolutionary properties in nature and software.” You don’t have to be a student at NYU to follow along, because Dan is taking a unique approach to this class by recording all of the lessons as videos and posting them online. You can watch the videos as the semester progresses at the course website.

The structure of the course is pretty open-ended, so I’ve decided to do my coursework in iOS using OpenGL ES 2. This gives me an opportunity to learn more about shaders and also port some of Dan’s examples into a new language. All of my code will be published on github in my Nature of Code repository.

 

 

Week 1

Much of this week was spent creating a “universal” (iPhone and iPad) app that will accommodate the sketches for the rest of the semester. It still needs some polish, but it’s a good place to start. The initial sketches address our first topic: randomness. Here are a couple videos that show them in action:

Random Walker

Perlin Walker