It’s Kataday – Let's play with the ants

We so enjoyed playing with our spider kata, last week, that we wanted to carry on with our bug theme.  

In the Ants Kata, you have an ant, running on a grid, which you are going to observe. This is also known as a Langton's Ant.

Now, to make it more interesting, we are adding in rules where the ant's movement is dictated by the colour of the square they enter and the colour of the square is flipped each time the ant enters it.

Simple enough?  Well, if that doesn't stretch you then we have an expanded version using more than 2 colours, naming schemes and even using a hexagonal grid.

The Ants Kata is aimed at the competent coder.  You can focus your practice on Test Driven Development and Algorithm Design.

Getting set up can be the roadblock to starting a kata. In our screenkatas you can join our Software Craftspeople and let them show you how to set up your repositories for Java, PHP, Python and Typescript. For other languages, check out our guide on GitHub.

Love our #kataday challenges?  Then find them all here and don't forget that our Katalyst portal is filled with programming problems to expand and sharpen your coding skills.