How it Works

Each journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end

What is a Burst?

A Burst starts as a simple idea:

Put a point at the center of a grid, then let it walk step by step in random directions until it collides with its own past.

Every Burst image you see on this site is the footprint of one of those walks.

The art shows where it went.

The data shows how long it survived and how far it managed to get.

The Rules of the walk

When a path dies

Billions of paths, hidden patterns

The rules of the walk

Start at the origin

Begin at coordinate (0, 0).

This is “step zero” and the birth of the path.

Choose a direction

At each step the path chooses one of 8 possible moves:

Up, down, left, right

Or one of the four diagonals

Move exactly one unit

Each move is the same “distance” on the grid.

The path leaves a mark on every coordinate it visits.

Never visit the same point twice

If the next step would land on a coordinate that has already been visited, the path dies at that moment.

The number of steps it took before that death is the path length.

When a path dies

The only way a path can die is by touching its own history.

If it tries to step into a previous footprint, that is a collision.

Sometimes this happens very early, after only a few dozen steps.

Sometimes a path lives a long time, curling around itself in tight, surprising shapes before it finally fails.

For each path we record things like:

Length: how many steps it survived

Maximum radius: how far it ever got from the starting point

Shape: the pattern of turns and loops it made on the grid

Over billions of paths, these simple death rules start to create very non-simple statistics.

Billions of paths, hidden patterns

Common life lengths

Some path lengths are surprisingly common, like “peaks” in a life expectancy chart.

Other lengths are rare, like gaps between stable islands.

How far paths tend to get

Many paths hug the origin and die early.

A few wander far out before they finally collide.

Where density builds up

Certain regions attract more traffic and collisions.

Others stay oddly empty, even after huge numbers of simulated walks.

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