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Alife Digest Number 033
ALIFE LIST: Artificial Life Research List Number 33 Thursday, August 23rd 1990
ARTIFICIAL LIFE RESEARCH ELECTRONIC MAILING LIST
Maintained by the Indiana University Artificial Life Research Group
Contents:
What fun!
Book announcement: "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 9 Aug 90 14:45:18 EST
From: Melanie Mitchell <mm@cogsci.indiana.edu>
Subject: What fun!
I was really impressed by the announcement for the International
Workshop on Parallel Problem Solving from Nature (PPSN).
I was especially intrigued by the "Ladies Programme" given
near the end of the announcement, including a Westphalia Park
walk, and a visit to a "museum of cookery-books". Gee, we
ladies sure have it good at these conferences, getting to
do all kinds of fun things, while the men have to sit inside
listening to all those boring and manly scientific talks.
Melanie Mitchell
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition
Indiana University
------------------------------
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 90 08:38:01 MDT
From: cgl%pullet@LANL.GOV (Chris Langton)
Subject: Book announcement: "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants"
Here is an announcement from Springer-Verlag for Lindenmayer and
Prusinkiewicz's new book: "The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants". The
announcement includes the table of contents and ordering information.
After the review, I have included a brief blurb that Springer-Verlag
asked me to write for press releases for the book. I apologize for
the somewhat "flowery" language (if you'll pardon the pun), but that's
the kind of promotional language they like to put in press releases.
As far as I can tell, they didn't use it!
The promotional language aside, this is a great book! It is stock full
of L-system "genotypes" for the generation of a great variety of botanical
structures and developmental patterns. Anybody interested in studying
plant structure, growth and development, embryology, the genotype/phenotype
relation, 2D tissue growth, or even 3D embryo development should definitely
run right out and devour this book.
The book is a great testament to the life and work of Aristid Lindenmayer,
who died last October. Prusinkiewicz and his collaborators at the University
of Regina deserve a healthy round of applause for the care and dedication
that went into its production.
I believe that Prusinkiewicz's Virtual Laboratory software, which was
used to produce the beautiful images in the book, is available for purchase
as well. I will find out the procedure for obtaining the software
and post the information here.
Cheers!
Chris Langton
Complex Systems Group
MS B213, Theoretical Division Phone: 505-667-9471
Los Alamos National Laboratory Email: cgl@LANL.GOV
Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
87545
-----------------(Springer-Verlag annoucement follows)----------------------
Springer-Verlag is proud to announce an important new book:
"The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants"
by
Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz
and
Aristid Lindenmayer
This book is the first comprehensive volume on the computer simulation of plant
development. It contains a full account of the algorithms used to model plant
shapes and developmental processes, Lindenmayer-systems in particular. With
nearly 50 color plates, the spectacular results of the modeling are vividly
shown.
The volume is the result of an interdisciplinary research effort. We believe
that it will be of interest to professionals working in the areas of
(theoretical) biology and botany, molecular and cell biology, mathematics,
computer science, computer graphics/animation, and the rapidly emerging field
of artificial life. The implications of the work will also be worthwhile to
laypersons intrigued by the aforementioned disciplines.
>From the Table of Contents:
1. Graphical modeling using L-systems
2. Modeling of trees
3. Developmental models of herbaceous plants
4. Phyllotaxis
5. Models of plant organs
6. Animation of plant development
7. Modeling of cellular layers
8. Fractal properties of plants
Appendix: Software environment.
Virtual laboratory and list of laboratory programs
Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz and Aristid Lindenmayer: The Algorithmic Beauty of
Plants. 238 pages, 48 color plates, ISBN 0-387-97297-8. Price: $39.95.
For ordering the book, please call our toll-free number
1-800-SPRINGER
(In New Jersey please call (201) 348-4033)
or contact our Santa Barbara office by e-mail:
springer@engrhub.ucsb.edu
--------------( Chris Langton's flowery review follows )-----------------
I think that I shall never see
a poem lovely as a tree.
Poems are made by fools like me
But only God can make a tree.
------------------------------
From: ``Trees''!the
There is a beautiful irony here, when we place Kilmer's evocative poetry
in the context of our current understanding of the nature of trees.
For we now know that it is DNA which makes a tree, and that DNA is
the material substrate in which the genetic code is expressed.
The genetic code is the language in which the poems of nature are written,
and it is these poems, penned in the ink of nucleic acids and cast in
intertwining doublets, that give rise to trees and flowers, and men and women.
Thus, syntax and semantics, grammar and interpretation, lie at the heart
of both poems and trees. Each is an elegant semantic structure, they
are merely cast in different media.
In this book, Aristid Lindenmayer and Przemyslaw Prusinkiewcz lay bare
the essential beauty of the poetry of nature. Here, the poetry is cast in
yet another language, the language of L-systems. In these pages trees, flowers,
meadows and forests spring to life from short, formal poems, written in a
terse verse. The wide variety of botanical structures, and the complex cycle
of their development from seed to bloom to seed again, are revealed fully
and with careful attention to anatomical detail.
Readers of this book will come to a deep appreciation for the manner in
which simple genotypes bloom into complex phenotypes. The authors clearly
elucidate the power of recursive description, and the extent to which it
is employed in the genetic poetry of nature.
This book is at once a scientific text, a book of poems, and a work of art.
The combination illustrates beautifully how language and information, pattern
and structure, can come to have a life of their own, in whatever medium they
are expressed, whether it be in the medium of carbon-chain chemistry or
in the medium of silicon circuitry.
-----------------------(end flowery review)--------------------------------
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