RESHARED POST FROM JOHN BAEZ

John Baez originally shared this post:

My last post showed a video of a ‘multi-scale Turing pattern’ which creates patterns that look biological. But it had perfect 3-fold symmetry artificially imposed on it, which is a bit of a cheat. Nature builds symmetrical patterns in some more subtle way – ‘imperfect’ but robust. So until we figure that out, I like this asymmetrical example better.

W. Blut wrote:

“It’s been more than two years since I came across his [Jonathan McCabe’s] multi-scale Turing pat­terns. They instantly intrigued me. And although I could recre­ate the gist of his images, I could never over­come the prac­ti­cal problems. In fact, the code proved haz­ardous to the elderly, infants and pregnant women. I thought my lack of numer­i­cal skill in tack­ling the huge equa­tions I ran into was the prob­lem. It was pon­der­ously slow and I suspected Jonathan had a secret lair packed with supercomputers.”

“Turns out I was being silly. An almost inci­den­tal post on Flickr revealed that Jonathan has a paper on his cyclic sym­met­ric multi-scale Turing patt.., what the hell, on his McCabeisms. And it’s full of DTC lines (a rarely needed acronym for “damn that’s clever”). Seems I wasn’t bark­ing up the wrong tree, I was in the wrong for­est, on the wrong con­ti­nent, on the wrong planet… As if that wasn’t enough, Jason Rampe pro­vides a blog post with use­ful point­ers in imple­ment­ing Jonathan’s idea. I say point­ers, it’s actu­ally more of a very elab­o­rate pseudocode than a blog post. So the McCabeism is out there, ready to be imple­mented by anyone.”

“So I did, […] and thanks to Jason, it only took a few hours.”

All the references can be found here:

http://www.wblut.com/2011/07/13/mccabeism-turning-noise-into-a-thing-of-beauty/