# Langton's ant > [[PORTAL_Cellular_automaton|Cellular automaton]] spine. ## Microsims — three.js <div class="microsim-player"> <iframe src="https://wikitube-3d-microsims.netlify.app/Langtons_ant_3D.html" width="100%" height="520" frameborder="0" loading="lazy" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin" title="Langton's ant — three.js microsim"></iframe> </div> <p class="wt-pending"><strong>Note:</strong> staged, awaiting CDN deploy — one of [[PORTAL_Cellular_automaton]]'s five hand-built three.js stations.</p> Langton's ant is a two-dimensional automaton in which a single agent — often called a turmite — walks a grid of two-colour tiles under a trivial rule: turn right on a white tile, turn left on a black tile, flip the tile's colour, then step forward. Christopher G. Langton introduced it in 1986 as a minimal example of how simple deterministic rules on a grid can generate open-ended, unpredictable behaviour. ## Overview Despite the rule's simplicity, roughly 500 chaotic-looking steps are typically followed by around 10,000 steps of increasing order before the ant locks into an infinitely repeating diagonal "highway" — one of the clearest small demonstrations of order emerging from deterministic chaos. This build renders the ant as an oriented cone leaving an instanced-tile trail behind it, supports generalised multi-state turmite rule strings such as RL, RLLR, and LLRR beyond the original two-colour rule, and includes a bounding-box-growth heuristic in the HUD that flags when the highway phase has likely begun. Like [[Conway's_Game_of_Life|Conway's Game of Life]], the ant is a [[Cellular_automaton|cellular automaton]] rule so simple it can be stated in a sentence, yet its long-run behaviour — Langton conjectured, and it was later proved, that the ant's path is always unbounded — was not obvious until the pattern was watched play out. **On the spine:** [[Cellular_automaton]] · [[Conway's_Game_of_Life]] · [[Von_Neumann_neighborhood]] · [[Elementary_cellular_automaton]] · [[Physics]]. ## Wikipedia : Wikitube **Strict pair:** [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton%27s_ant) : [Wikitube](https://en.wikitube.io/wiki/Langton's_ant) --- *Repopulated 2026-08-05 · existing three.js asset renamed + wired, Wikipedia-sourced overview · 0 deletions.*