Defective Computing

Biomorphs java applet.

Richard Dawkins, genetic theorist, created the biomorph algorithm in his book "The Blind Watchmaker", in order to explain his theory of genetic determinism. Although they can look very complex, the images that the program creates actually have a very simple set of instructions.
An implementation of the algorithm in a java applet is here.
http://www.phy.syr.edu/courses/mirror/biomorph/

Each biomorph in the Blind Watchmaker algorithm has the following 15 genes:

genes 1-8 control the overall shape of the biomorph,
gene 9 the depth of recursion,
genes 10-12 the colour of the biomorph,
gene 13 the number of segmentations,
gene 14 the size of the separation of the segments,
gene 15 the shape used to draw the biomorph (line, oval, rectangle, etc).

These kind of drawing rules could be very easily put into play by the flash drawing api.

posted by Hannah Drayson @ 7:03 PM