Colouring in: bored-student-in-the-early-hours-of-the-morning style

You remember the fun of colouring in don't you? A sheet of paper printed with some monochrome pattern was given to you by your parents to keep you quiet for a couple hours. You steadily coloured in each block with care and attention, pretending each one filled in was another area of Metropolis that had fallen to the pandemic... Oh, that was just me? Perhaps that goes some way to explaining why I am the sort of person who writes a programming blog at 3am.

Seeing as I am writing this at 3am I really should write about something. It would appear that I have written a very good introduction to a post about colouring in, which is particularly fortuitous as I have a very good program to write about that does exactly that.

What I have done is altered my last program so that instead of using a square box it uses any user inputted shape. To input a shape you first need to create a boundary of black cells, ensuring that it is closed, i.e. every black cell is touching at least two others horizontally, vertically or diagonally. You then need to set a spawn point by entering any characters in any one cell in the centre of your shape. In this rendition every ant is spawned at one cell for simplicity. So suppose I entered this:

A heart turns out to be an easy bit image.

Here the '<3' is my spawn point. If I then run my code with one ant it produces this:

The only thing cuter would be a kitten. I am not doing a kitten.

I am going to admit that it took me several runs to get this because the colours are still on random, but my romantic side refused to have anything put a red heart. Alright, pink. I'm not quite romantic enough to spend 30 minutes of non-sleeping for my computer to happen to pick brilliant crimson out of the sixteen million possible colours allowed by my code.

31,

mathmo