This page contains a prototype of the Turtle on a Sequence, a tool for detecting self-similarity and divisibility relations between a sequence and its subsequences.  This is part of Numberscope.  This is a prototype, please expect bugs!

To launch the prototype, open the following link in Chrome (or another browser supporting the new implementation of bigint in Javascript):  Turtle on a Sequence.

Give it a minute to load!

Some tips and tricks:

• To understand the screen in default setup, imagine a tiny turtle starts at the origin, and follows a set of rules which turn terms of the sequence into instructions to turn and step forward.  The rules are listed at the right side of the page.
• To get started seeing some pretty pictures, I suggest tapping 9 and 0 to cycle forward and backward through some interesting presets.  You can also tap e and r to cycle forward and backward through the full set of several dozen hard-coded sequences.
• Things you can do:
  • Set a modulus to consider the sequence modulo.  (Otherwise large terms are discarded.)
  • Add and remove rules (press a and x).
  • Change rules:  use arrow keys to highlight a part of a rule and use +/- to change its value.
  • zoom, pan, thicken lines, change colour
  • increase/decrease number of terms
  • set the rules to change at a certain rate, so the picture morphs
• What are you seeing?  Beware that it is very easy to see structure in nothingness!  Even a random sequence will appear patternful with certain turtle rules.  For example, setting angles only to 120 and 60, and using only integer step values, a random walk will gradually fill out a triangular lattice.  Some phenomena I’ve noticed are:
  • if one rule has a large angle and another does not, you will tend to pick up visually the length of subsequences that call those rules consecutively; this can lead to little circles separated by long lines, for example
  • certain sequences have fractal behaviour, such as p-adic valuations, Thue-Morse, Beatty sequences, and these produce very pleasing pictures
  • periodicity will also be very apparent, either by a finite picture, or a picture that walks off one direction with the same pattern repeated

Some screenshots