I’ve been writing a lot of code for my next video in Code, Sound & Surround. One small part of that has turned out to be interesting enough to show off on its own. I built some tools for plotting and animating Voronoi diagrams in Ruby, and now I’ve published them on GitHub.
A Voronoi diagram (Voronoi rhymes with “enjoy”) or Voronoi partition shows which areas are closest to a set of starting points. Choose one or more points on a 2D plane (you can also do 3D or higher, but I haven’t done that). Draw a convex polygon around each point, showing the area that is closest to that point. That’s a Voronoi diagram.
Each edge of a polygon should be half-way between two points, and each corner of a polygon is equally distant to three or more points. Every polygon has one point inside it, and every point has one polygon around it, with no overlap. Give each surrounding polygon its own color, and you get something like this:
