Earlier tonight I read the following article (via an NYT piece about Nautilus mag):
For the work that led to his 1952 paper, Turing wanted to understand the underlying mechanism that produces natural patterns. He proposed that patterns such as spots form as a result of the interactions between two chemicals that spread throughout a system much like gas atoms in a box do, with one crucial difference. Instead of diffusing evenly like a gas, the chemicals, which Turing called “morphogens,” diffuse at different rates. One serves as an activator to express a unique characteristic, like a tiger’s stripe, and the other acts as an inhibitor, kicking in periodically to shut down the activator’s expression.
And then watched an older video linked from it:
Mathematical Impressions: Shell Games
From the description:
One-dimensional, two-state cellular automata produce a list of bits at discrete time steps, whose output, depending on the parameters, may be trivial or very complex. Surprisingly, this simple mechanism can be Turing complete — that is, capable of calculating anything that any computer can calculate.
The knitting part reminded me of this photo I took of one of my mom’s crocheting pattern books:
“I can read patterns. It’s kind of like programming,” says @excdinglyrandom while crocheting next to me.
I then went to Hart’s site, which included a link to his daughter’s YouTube page. I hadn’t watched one of Vi Hart‘s videos for a while, so I browsed and immediately clicked the one on Folding Space-Time:
And, of course, it reminded me of Crab Canon on a Möbius Strip:
All of this really just being another reminder that I need to continue reading Gödel, Escher, Bach!
One thought on “Patterns in shells, cellular automata, knitting and music”