Rectangular Rainbow Seeds

I didn't plan on making another useless, yet hopefully delightful javascript page so soon after Heat Flow, but I was in a mood.

I was thinking about procedurally generated content and Elite. I was thinking about processing. I was thinking about the myriad mind-expanding examples of beautiful complexity emerging from simple origins. Snowflakes and more snowflakes. Fire works and trees and birds and worlds. Living smoke or just wriggling colors.

Just a little bit of code, a little randomness perhaps, a little growth, a bit of interaction, probably some feedback and voila. Plant a seed and with a little time and water this complex thing that is not a seed comes striving out of the ground.

I've been thinking about storing an entire encyclopedia on a toothpick. It's no coincidence that the input to a pseudo random number generator is called a seed. Complex things can grow from this little piece of information and in a computer program, conditions can be perfectly duplicated such that the same seed will always produce the same results.

What I've created here is far from fancy or complex, but it was an experiment I felt the need to perform. I didn't know what I would get when I let the program run, though I probably could have predicted something like a rectangle explosion of all the colors in the rainbow clashing fiercely.

To see what I mean, go here. Put in a number and click load seed. Be patient, the result may take a few seconds to load. Experiment with a few different seeds. If you put in the same seed, you will always get the same result. To clear the screen just refresh your browser.

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