A whole fern frond is contained in one rewriting rule applied five times. Aristid Lindenmayer’s L-systems, introduced in 1968, start from a short string and replace each character with a longer one, after which a turtle reads the final string: F means move and draw, square brackets open and close a branch, plus and minus turn right and left. The binary tree turns 22 degrees, the fern 25, while the Koch snowflake grows a spike on every segment so its perimeter runs to infinity around a finite area.
A whole fern frond is contained in one rewriting rule applied five times. Aristid Lindenmayer’s L-systems, introduced in 1968, start from a short string and replace each character with a longer one, after which a turtle reads the final string: F means move and draw, square brackets open and close a branch, plus and minus turn right and left. The binary tree turns 22 degrees, the fern 25, while the Koch snowflake grows a spike on every segment so its perimeter runs to infinity around a finite area.
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