Author:

• Name: Yusuke Endoh
  Location: JP - Japan

Award: Most likely to shock

To build:

    make all

To use:

    ./prog

Try:

    ./try.sh

Judges’ remarks:

While lightning can strike twice, when the final discharge is well grounded, then sparks fly.

The randomly generated spanning tree simulates current flow in ASCII, with current intensity represented in terminal escape sequence brightness.

Run and rerun the program to see electrical discharge is conveyed in Lichtenberg-like patterns on the screen.

A fun challenge

Create an alternative form of prog.c (i.e., prog.alt.c) that prints a line instead of using varying spectral color, and varying brightness of a yellow line, using 256 ANSI Color Codes. Choose a colors/brightness palette to represent the charge intensity.

The above fun challenge is still open. See the “Fun challenge Info” section for details.

Author’s remarks:

Terminal Discharge Simulator ✨

A terminal is where electrical discharge happens. A terminal is also where this program displays it. It simulates terminal discharge – inside your terminal.

Take a look at the source code – it is shaped like a lightning bolt itself.

How to Run

    make
    ./prog

A terminal emulator that supports ANSI escape sequences is required. The program uses the current (adj., not noun) terminal dimensions via preprocessor definitions. The Makefile automatically passes $COLUMNS and $LINES to the compiler, so just resizing your terminal and recompiling will change the canvas size.

To compile manually:

    cc -Dw=$COLUMNS -Dh=$LINES -o prog prog.c

What You’ll See

The output is a Lichtenberg figure – a branching electrical discharge pattern – rendered with \, /, and the ANSI underline attribute for horizontal connections. Brighter (bold) segments indicate paths carrying more “charge,” while dimmer segments represent thinner branches. Each run produces a different figure, seeded by the process ID (PID).

How It Works

Real dielectric breakdown works like this: an electrical field builds up in an insulating material. At random weak points along the boundary of the discharge, the insulation fails and the channel extends. Many tiny “streamers” branch outward, but only the paths that carry enough current survive – the rest fade into darkness. The result is the fractal branching pattern that Lichtenberg captured on film.

This program faithfully simulates that process. The algorithm has three phases.

1. The Grid

The program builds a triangular lattice from the terminal dimensions. For a terminal of width w and height h, the lattice has M = w+1 columns and H = h/2 rows, giving each node six neighbors:

      up-left (i=1) *   * up-right (i=2)
                     \ /
        left (i=3) *--*--* right (i=4)
                     / \
    down-left (i=5) *   * down-right (i=6)

Each node maps to a pair of terminal characters. Diagonal edges (up-left/down-right) are rendered as \, diagonal edges (up-right/down-left) as /, and horizontal edges (left/right) as a two-character-wide underline via the ANSI underline attribute.

2. Tree Construction – The Breakdown

A terminal – the electrical kind this time – is placed near the center of the lattice. From it, the discharge grows outward:

• Maintain a frontier: the set of lattice nodes adjacent to the tree but not yet part of it. This is the boundary where the insulation is under stress.
• At each step, pick a random frontier node (using a 16-bit LCG seeded by getpid()), add it to the tree, and check its six neighbors. Any unvisited neighbor is added to the frontier.
• Each newly visited node records the direction it was reached from (1–6) and a pointer back to its parent.
• This continues until the frontier is empty and the tree spans the entire reachable lattice.

The result is a random spanning tree rooted at the seed point – a network of every possible discharge path, most of them too faint to see.

3. Charge Accumulation – The Current Flows

Now current flows. The tree is traversed from leaves back to the root, and each node passes “charge” upward to its parent:

• A leaf contributes a base charge of 8.
• An internal node contributes its own accumulated charge (from all its children) plus 8.
• The charge is stored in the upper bits of each cell’s value; the lower 3 bits preserve the direction.
• Nodes whose total charge is too small (below N/20, where N = W*H) have their direction bits masked out, effectively making them invisible during rendering.

Many thin streamers converge into fewer, thicker channels toward the root. The tree of all possible paths is still there, but only the high-current paths will be visible – just like in a real discharge.

4. Rendering – The Flash

The lattice is traversed and each edge of the spanning tree is drawn:

• Diagonal edges (/ for directions 2 and 5, \ for directions 1 and 6) are drawn only if the node’s direction bits survived the masking step. Thin branches, whose direction was masked to 7, produce spaces instead – they fade into darkness.
• Horizontal edges (directions 3 and 4) are rendered using the ANSI underline attribute (SGR 4) rather than the _ character. This allows a diagonal edge and a horizontal edge to overlap at the same node – for example, / with underline produces a shape resembling ∠.
• Brightness is determined by the total charge of three adjacent nodes (the cell and its two lower neighbors). Bold (SGR 1) for the thickest main channels, normal for medium branches, and dim (SGR 2) for thin ones.

The overall effect: only the thick, high-current paths glow brightly as yellow slashes, while countless fine tendrils vanish into the background, producing the characteristic branching pattern of a Lichtenberg figure.

Primary files

• prog.c - entry source code
• Makefile - entry Makefile
• prog.orig.c - original source code
• try.sh - script to try entry

Secondary files

• 2025_endoh2.tar.bz2 - download entry tarball
• README.md - markdown source for this web page
• .entry.json - entry summary and manifest in JSON
• .gitignore - list of files that should not be committed under git
• .path - directory path from top level directory
• .date-range - copyright date range for this directory
• index.html - this web page

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