Hypnotic Self-Organizing Transportation Network Simulator
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007
ChemicalBurn is a hypnotic screensaver for OS X, written by Michael Ash, that simulates a self-optimizing network. It randomly lays out nodes on the screen then has each attempt to route packages to the others. The more frequently routes are used by packages, the faster the connection becomes.
I lost several hours yesterday tweaking the various settings and seeing how they affected the network — if you want to procrastinate yourself into a trance, this is an excellent way to do it.