Click in any of the black boxes below and observe the resulting pattern. Keep clicking along the top and along the side until you get something interesting. Use your Refresh button whenver you want to start over from scratch. (Hint: what kind of patterns do you get if you always fill groups of 2 or 3 boxes in a row and always leave groups of 2 or 3 unfilled?)
Responsivness may be a little sluggish in Safari, but it should be fine in Firefox. This is apparently because Safari uses a crummy implementation of Javascript.
Yes, this is related to weaving. In fact this is a simplistic web version of a program called WaveWeaver™ which I originally wrote in C, and which is available as shareware. This program was in turn inspired by work I did as a teanager using hardware (TTL integrated circuits and and oscilloscope video display), in which I discovered "weaving patterns" emerging by accident when I was trying to do something else entirely. The end result is more similar to weaving than what I originally created. In fact I have never woven a thing, and although I have intended to learn about this I have not yet learned much. What I do know is that the patterns you see above are similar to weaves that can be made using the simples "four-harness" looms. There are real software packages available to simulate weaving in more useful ways. The intention of this page, and the software on which is loosely modelled is somewhat different, being oriented toward the pure enjoyment of interacting with patterns, and the enjoyment of the patterns themselves.
Please email me if you are interested in a shareware version of WaveWeaver™, or if you have any other responses to this page. The program is available for Macintosh only and is a 68K application which will not work under MacOS X. I will update it as interest permits. Although there are practical limits to what a JavaScript program can do, I also intend to improve the demo above.
The background images on the current page and on this page as well as several other pages on this site were created using WaveWeaver™. More samples will be added soon.
I realize this information is rather sparse. Until I can write more here I hope you can enjoy the experience of interacting with the patterns above.
I am working on a multi-color version of the above demo, which you can try by clicking here.
JavaScript source and algorithms on this page are Copyright © 1989-2001 Kurt Karl Bigler, All Rights Reserved.