ITT: everyone posting their L-System applications
L-System
11–19 of 19 posts
Re: L-System
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
L-systems can be used to describe fractals but they aren’t fractals. They are formal languages.
Thanks, so L-Systems are to Fractals as Code is to Application.
Sort of. There are many fractals that are not described by L systems (whereas every application is written in code)
Re: L-System
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
L-systems can be used to describe fractals but they aren’t fractals. They are formal languages.
Thanks, so L-Systems are to Fractals as Code is to Application.
The Mandelbrot set cannot be described by an L-system. And not every L-system describes a fractal.
Re: L-System
#14ITT: everyone posting their L-System applications
[deleted]
Re: L-System
#15lol, the timing of this is impeccable. I was literally just playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and thinking about procedurally generated cities.
Re: L-System
#16ITT: everyone posting their L-System applications
I think at this point, it’s an unofficial HN tradition every time L-systems are mentioned, and I kind of love it.
Re: L-System
#17lol, the timing of this is impeccable. I was literally just playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and thinking about procedurally generated cities.
You might like this: https://github.com/marian42/wavefunctioncollapse
Re: L-System
#18Aren't L-systems just fractals ? Also, if someone can expand, what do you think of Stephen Wolfram's theory of everything[0] which to me seems quite similar to L-systems (I might be completely wrong here). Has anyone combined cellular automata and L-systems, will that lead to....simulating evolution? [0] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/04/finally-we-may-h... (Read How it Works section).
Fractals are sets - maps of the results of a recursive calculation using a seed formula. They happen to have deep structure, but it's implicit in the process and not obvious.
L-systems are explicit structural grammars with some simple recursion, and are much shallower. You can more or less predict the shape of a simple L-system just by looking at it. The recursion - usually not many levels - looks nice because we like modulated repetition. And some natural systems seem to have evolved similar macro-level structures. But they're pretty trivial conceptually.
Cellular automata are part way between the two.
None of the above really evolve, because they don't support natural selection or recombination.
There's a class of solution-explorers called genetic algorithms which were a thing before ML (kind of...) took over a similar space. GAs do evolve, but they're not particularly efficient and they suffer from the usual problem of getting stuck in local maxima.
It turns out that for interesting and open-ended evolution you need a much bigger parameter space than any of these toy algos - like the one nature has - and current computing can't handle that (yet).
Re: L-System
#19ITT: everyone posting their L-System applications
I'll add my two:
- https://twitter.com/lindenmoji tweets randomly generated L-systems using an emoji language (though the traditional rules work as well); you can @ and it will reply with an image
- https://lindenmayer.club/lindenmoji/#?curve=ab%0Aa%3D%E2%9E%... is an interactive playground for L-systems that shows both the visual output and the first few expansions of the specified rule