The author shares a personal project implementing the Red & Black knights pattern from a Numberphile video, finding joy in the emergent patterns from a number spiral, and plans to optimize and extend it.
<p>What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!</p>
<p>Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.</p>
# What are you doing this week?
Source: [https://lobste.rs/s/yiwcln/what_are_you_doing_this_week](https://lobste.rs/s/yiwcln/what_are_you_doing_this_week)
In between boring stuff and chores, I've been working through an implementation of the[Red & Black knights pattern recently featured on Numberphile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiX4CFIiegM)\. It's a relatively simple implementation but seeing the[patterns](https://i.imghurr.com/e/awolRtvxpr.png)take shape has been fun, and seeing the[1 million pattern](https://i.imghurr.com/e/DiOuxGxYAM.jpg)match was gratifying\.
This week my plan is to make the data representations a little more efficient, the underlying number spiral generation a little faster, and perhaps have additional representations \(eg video\); after those are ticked off, extending to other patterns \-\- additional colors, different pieces or other rules \-\- comes next\.
My motivation was experiencing the same kind of wonder Neil Sloane showed in the video, on seeing chaos fall into order; very reminiscient to me of cellular automata, which I'd also like explore at some point\. Math videos like Numberphile, 3blue1brown & co have a wonderful way of making the inaccessible accessible\- passing things down carefully from a high shelf; in this case, the pattern was on a shelf I could just about reach\.
As a bonus,[Ulam spirals](https://i.imghurr.com/e/DJZkPrNh1e.jpg)fall out :\)
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