Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop, at the European Conference on Artificial Life (MEW @ ECAL), Lyon, France
Résumé
L-Systems proved to be powerful tools for encoding plant morphologies, yet their application to mobile creatures was more difficult, eg. Komosinski (2003). In addition, blackbox models such as GRNs, while flexible enough, were put aside due to their relatively high computational cost as well as their inability to produce intelligible genomic data. The directed graphs described by Sims (1994)(hereafter called'graphtals') have been successfully used to generate complex yet functional body plans for animated creatures. However, despite their potential to be applied to plants, they have, to the best of our knowledge, not been so far. Nevertheless their expressive prowess and structural simplicity were deemed enough to model both the animal and vegetal kingdoms while allowing for insights into the mechanisms of evolution. This paper shows how graphtals can be used to generate plants which are growing from a seed in a physically simulated 3D world.