This post is based on the recent xsibase thread Golden Section Spiral in ICE, which in turn is based on Patrick Boucher’s 2006 article Points on a sphere.

So…here’s an ICE version of the Golden section spiral algorithm for evenly distributing points on a sphere. It’s a typical example of basic “thinking in ICE”: when you see a for loop in the alogrithm/pseudocode, you should see “in ICE” an array (or data set) flowing through a graph.

Here’s my GoldenSectionSpiral compound (although if you’ve never converted a scripted alogithm to ICE, you should do it yourself just for the exercise 😉 I thought the spiral effect was interesting, so I put in an option to not convert radians to degrees (which is necessary to get the real evenly distributed points).