L-Systems
Take a look at this excerpt from The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants (Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, Springer-Verlag, 1990). (Note that you must be logged in to Google with your Macalester account for that link to work. I recommend using the download button and opening in your computer’s native PDF reader, which will almost certainly be more pleasant than reading inside that Google Drive page.)
This influential and widely beloved book is a pillar in the world of creative coding. It is a delight. It is also not easy reading: it assumes a lot of prior knowledge, and the writing is not as lucid as it could be. You will probably find much of this excerpt opaque…if not incomprehensible. That is OK. Your goal in this reading assignment is not to understand every word of the text! Instead:
- Skim the whole thing. Get a feel for it. What is the topic? What are the sections?
- Which parts feel completely opaque? (“I don’t even know how to start understanding this!!”) Skip those parts for now.
- Can you spot some parts that you do already understand, or suspect you might? Study those parts more closely.
- Can you spot some things are either just like WOGL or different from WOGL?
If you can make sense of a few pieces here and there, good! That’s all you need to do for this assignment. Once you have that, submit a short reading response on Moodle.
If you are interested in exploring further, either now or later:
- Here is a good writeup with more information about L-systems.
- This L-System Explorer is an online interactive playground, much like the WOGL implementation I gave you but for L-systems.
- The Internet Archive has a scan of the entire book.