Worked Animation Example with Graphics Primitives: Visualizing the Random Walk

Many processes in the natural world can be modelled by random walks. An example is the trajectory of a particular  molecule in a gas at low pressure.  The next few lines of code produce random walks and display them graphically:

Create a function that returns a graphic object putting the step number at the correct place:

Create a function that returns a graphic object connecting a line between the current position and the previous.

We can animate the jumps, but the result will not be satisfactory because each frame will be a different size...

If we use the PlotRange from a graphical object that contains all the points, we can fix the framesize, we use AbsoluteOptions

The animation is more satisfactory if we include the history... here we create a table of objects leading up to the current step.

Created by Wolfram Mathematica 6.0  (28 August 2007)