L

This is another session of BS practice. You may want to skip this if you're bored.

L-systems hold great potential for modelling organic growth. They have been successfully used to accurately describe plant growth, and planners have been using them for decades to generate  urban growth and decay patterns. As a sidenote, most known knitting patterns have been described in terms of reasonably simple L-system rule-sets.

Constrained L-systems can help describe real-life behavior more accurately. When a generative pattern is interpreted as an environmental variable (for example, a pattern could be used to describe the currents in a flowing body of water), and reasonably simple autonomous agents are made to 'live' in the environment, such agents behave in a surprisingly life-like manner even though the generated environment does not even approach to approximate the real environmental situations. Thus it is extremely cheap computationally to model simple organism behavior without spending resources on environmental simulation.

Originally posted on March 26 and backdated to March 19.