M&M Pixels

What else would you do late at night with a big bag of M&Ms? Since I only had three colors (I ate the rest) I first built a hexagonal grid, just like pixels on a screen.

This perspective shows translational symmetry along same-color rows.

This perspective shows adjacent translational symmetry.


Next up, spirals; a two branch hexagonal spiral,


a four branch (though two color) square spiral,


a three branch hexagonal spiral,


and a six branch (though three color) hexagonal spiral. Notice the missing center!


Then I just mushed together the colored piles.


Third act: fractals! Sierpinski's triangle was the hardest thing, because it relies on a triangle grid, not a hexagonal one. This means that the circle M&M is taking the place of a triangle pixel, so the M&Ms couldn't be tangential to six others.

Here I add red M&Ms to the areas that would continue to gain iterations to make it clearer.


I didn't have enough M&Ms for many iterations of the next fractal, so I decided to make them decay as you go northeast.


1
11
21
1211
111221
312211

The famous "look-and-say" sequence, in M&Ms. Here I make as many complete rows as possible.


And here I truncate some rows to fill up the picture. I love how you can see clearly that the lines start to converge to a repeating pattern! This also happens on the right side, but I didn't have enough time to make a right-aligned one. Maybe next time!

-Alex Scott