awesome. i did a short research project on "patterns in nature" in my Introduction to Computational Science course.
we got a bunch of differential equations that simulated so called "reaction-diffusion" chemical reactions, that could produce patterns like this, if you tweaked them correctly.
i know that it looks like this because it grows like this, but it grows like this because of a reason, and that reason is nearly all these patterns are somehow somewhere based on a
Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system.
ok we didn't have time to try out all different kind of formulas, so we only got the most easy-to-acquire patterns, which are the blobby shapes you also see in the link above .. but what was my surprise when i was watching a friend's tropical aquarium, and see a fish swimming around with
the exact same pattern i just simulated in my experiments!! w00t
the coolest thing is, it had two main parameters, and by tweaking those we could make the spot-patterns on the tail, the stripe-patterns on the body and the maze-patterns on the nose, all out of one formula.
Poll