I stumbled on a interesting pattern-generating process the other day, called reaction-diffusion. To quote wikipedia: “Reaction–diffusion systems are mathematical models which explain how the concentration of one or more substances distributed in space changes under the influence of two processes: local chemical reactions in which the substances are transformed into each other, and diffusion which causes the substances to spread out over a surface in space.”

There is a lot of different types and variations with names that makes it sound pretty advanced: Turing (which my experiment is based on), Meinhardt, Gray-Scott and Ginzburg-Landau. These patterns can be seen in nature, like dots and stripes on animal fur. There is some  java applets (or I’m sure there are flash apps as well) on the web doing this faster and more advanced than mine, but I had some ideas that I wanted to try. More of that in future posts.

Open and try the demo here. If you have enough patient, play around with the settings, otherwise check out the presets. To begin the process, hit “Start” and to start over make sure to hit “Reset” first.

Original source can be found here. If you want my haxe-version, just let me know.