Procedural generation by hand

Years ago I was on project with a lot of meetings, so to occupy my hands I began drawing these tedious little patterns on the index cards stocked in the company conference rooms. The pattern would start as a perimeter of regularly spaced dots:

Then I would place dots at select points in the grid, aiming for about 50% coverage:

Usually the dots were chosen arbitrarily, other times I used bits of text to determine where dots went (letters A through M got a dot, N through Z didn't). Occasionally I tried something more structured, but as the point was to occupy my hands and free my brain to participate in the meeting, most often I placed dots at random.

Once I constructed such a dot array, I would connect pairs of dots, starting at the leftmost column:

In the second column, I liked to start at the second dot down, rather than the first:

The rest of the columns would alternate between starting at the first dot or starting at the second, however far down it may be:

Then the same thing but horizontally:

Finally, I shaded in regions such that no adjacent regions had the same color:

This doesn't take very long with a 10×10 grid, so for long meetings, I would make it as big as I could (on an index card):

To me these self-intersecting-designs that look like QR codes are evocative of procedurally generated caves, dungeons, and starship corridors.

I'll explore some variations of this process in the next post.