/sci/ - Science & Math

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmite

Can someone help me understand this page? I think these patterns are really cool, but I don't understand how they are generating these. The notation doesn't seem to make sense to me. For example, for picture related:

The turmite specified as {{{1, 8, 1}, {1, 8, 1}}, {{1, 2, 1}, {0, 1, 0}}} shown at 10211 timesteps. This string is a curly-bracketed table of n_states rows and n_colors columns, where each entry is a triple of integers. The elements of each triple are: a) new color of the square, b) direction(s) for the turmite to turn: 1=noturn, 2=right, 4=u-turn, 8=left, c) new internal state of the turmite. For example, the triple {1,2,1} says: a) set the color of the square to 1, b) turn right (2), c) adopt state 1 and move forward one square.

But this doesn't actually make sense. If i'm reading it correctly, say we are starting from state {1,8,1}. This tells us to set color of whatever square we are on to 1, then change direction to left, and then set state to state 1. But state 1 is just {1,8,1} again, which then sets us to state 1, and now we are just in a loop of the same state over and over...