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Woven Labyrinth

Truchet's 1704 two-triangle tile, randomly quarter-turned 256 times, chains into a flowing quilt.

Woven Labyrinth, a square grid of tiles, each split corner to corner into one orange and one navy triangle, under a title and a double frame
Click the picture for the full-size render.

How it is made

Sébastien Truchet's 1704 tile is a square split corner to corner into two contrasting triangles. Each of 256 copies is turned by a random quarter turn, and because the diagonals meet from tile to tile, the single motif chains into a continuous, flowing labyrinth. The program carries its own copy of artkit's truchet.

Details

Category
Geometry and fractals
Libraries
none: this piece is plain PostScript
Added
2026-08-01
Page size
640 × 640 points

Source

View source the whole program in a scrolling window, or read gallery/woven_labyrinth.ps on GitHub. To draw it yourself, from a checkout of the repository:

pscat --page 640x640 gallery/woven_labyrinth.ps

Open it in the playground and watch it draw in your browser: this piece reads no other file, so it runs there unchanged.

The first 40 of 89 lines of the source 
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Title: Woven Labyrinth
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 640 640
%%EndComments

% A quilt built from the oldest Truchet tile there is: Sébastien
% Truchet's 1704 original was nothing but a square split corner to
% corner into two contrasting triangles. Scatter that one motif across
% a grid at four random quarter-turns and the diagonals chain into a
% continuous, flowing labyrinth — no two runs the same, though every
% run of *this* file is (seeded rand: same seed, same weave). The
% frame and the grid's own stitch-lines are the only other ink.
%
% Gallery II (Stage 24, tiling library) — inlines `chance` and
% `truchet` from lib/artkit.ps per the gallery's self-containment
% doctrine (see hortus.ps).
%
%   pscat --page 640x640 gallery/woven_labyrinth.ps

11 srand

% --- the toolkit subset (from lib/artkit.ps) -------------------------
/chance { rand 8192 idiv exch mod } def
/truchet {
    /tgproc exch def /tgrows exch def /tgcols exch def
    /tgh exch def /tgw exch def /tgy exch def /tgx exch def
    /tgcw tgw tgcols div def
    /tgch tgh tgrows div def
    0 1 tgrows 1 sub {
        /tgj exch def
        0 1 tgcols 1 sub {
            /tgi exch def
            gsave
                tgx tgi tgcw mul add tgcw 2 div add
                tgy tgj tgch mul add tgch 2 div add
                translate
                4 chance 90 mul rotate
                tgcw tgch tgproc
            grestore
        } for

On GitHub