Honorable Mention: Travel Tree

Photography by Jason Hedetniemi, Ph.D., instructor of mathematics,
Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College

My submission is a computer-generated image portraying a depth first search tree on a grid of pixels. It was generated from a piece of code that I wrote that is only 242 lines long. The program travels from one pixel in the grid to a neighbor pixel in a depth-first manner. The result is that long meandering paths are followed throughout the image. When the program finds a new pixel, it assigns that pixel a color that is slightly different from the color of the pixel where the program is currently standing. If there are no new pixels to find from the program’s current location, then it backtracks until it finds a new pixel. The computation time varies based on how big of an image it’s creating, but the image I am submitting was completed with 20 minutes of compute time.