Physics, autonomous agents, and emergence

This module is where your visuals stop being drawings and start being populations. In a live set, an agent ecosystem is the visual layer that stays alive between your edits: a murmuration drifting over a techno drop, a spring network twitching in time with a bassline. The audience sees an organism, not a loop — and the whole task here is to build one on a Processing/p5 canvas that you can perturb live without it collapsing into either uniformity or chaos.

The arc starts scaffolded: define one agent class (“a class is a template; an instance is one concrete object”), give it the velocity-plus-acceleration update, and get a single body bouncing. Then multiply it into an array and add circle-circle collision — these two frame-loop mechanics are the part-task drills, because during a performance you will retype them from muscle memory. With mechanics in hand, the module shifts to behaviour: Braitenberg’s sensor-to-motor wiring is the minimal template for “agents that seem to want things,” and Reynolds’ three boids rules or the spring/repulsion force pair show how purely local rules self-organise into flocks and readable layouts. The final, unsupported stretch is compositional control: reseeding initial positions and injecting bounded jitter, so you can steer the macro form without touching the rules — exactly what the capstone demands you demonstrate live.

Required atoms are the load-bearing set: OOP structure, physics integration, collision, the emergence concept, each named local-rule family, and the two perturbation principles — the capstone fails without any one of them. Supporting atoms widen the palette: inheritance for specialised agent variants, the multiply-by-100 instinct, and cousins like circle packing, DLA growth, and human-driven agents that suggest where this ecosystem thinking goes next.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

particle-system

let pts = font.textToPoints('P5', 0, 200, 200, {sampleFactor: 0.2})

_{p5live-0029 · CC0-1.0}

physics-sim

let dir = p5.Vector.random2D().mult(random(2, 5))

_{p5live-0013 · CC0-1.0}