one of my primary hobbies is generative "art", if such a monstrosity can even be termed such. tbh haven't been doin much of it lately but hope to get back into it soon; this shit gives me life
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RT @pee_zombie
@generativist I've got something even better
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1425675298314539011
this was made w/ L-systems, which are one of my favorite tools; originally invented to describe the growing logic of plants, its a recursive string-replacement system for generating turtle instructions, first described in The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
while originally botanical in nature, these L-systems can be repurposed for general generative purposes, as the rules are quite flexible
this one here is a simple Hilbert curve, a space-filling curve, ie a function which is intended to traverse every point in a certain space
"turtle" is a whimsical name for a program which follows a set of instructions to produce images; imagine a turtle w/ a market attached; as it crawls, it draws
pictured is Metatron's cube, an object w/ Kabbalistic significance, which I here desecrate for aesthetic purposes
L-systems can be leveraged not just for well-known algorithmic constructs, but as an exploratory tool to generate cool-looking imagery from simple rules
here is something I iteratively arrived on, reminiscent of spiral phyllotaxis, ie the arrangement of leaves on a succulent
for these images, I used a L-systems variant called "lindenmoji", created by @beaugunderson; thanks beau!
you can try out his cool interactive editor here
https://lindenmayer.club/lindenmoji
string-replacement systems are one of the simplest language constructions, p much the point at which we transition from automata theory to PL theory
here we see a Koch snowflake, a fractal constuction, self-similar at every scale
these curves are remarkable in their simplicity