Decoding Nature

Catalog description

How can we capture the unpredictable evolutionary and emergent properties of nature in software? How can understanding the mathematical principles behind our physical world help us to create digital worlds? And how can implementing these code-based simulations offer insight and perspective on both environmental and human behaviors. This course attempts to address these questions by focusing on the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems using p5.js (a JavaScript library in the spirit of Java's Processing framework). We will explore a variety of forces and behaviors that occur naturally in our physical world. This includes properties of movement, physics, genetics, and neural networks. For each topic, we will write code to simulate those occurrences in a digital environment. The results will usually be visual in nature and manifested in the form of interactive animated coding sketches.