L-Systems

A Python implementation of Aristid Lindenmayer systems (L-Systems) for purely pedagogical purposes.

L-Systems uses Python's turtle graphics for rendering the L-Systems.

What is an L-System?

Taken from the wikipedia article:

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar.

An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial "axiom" string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures.

L-systems were introduced and developed in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist at the University of Utrecht. Lindenmayer used L-systems to describe the behaviour of plant cells and to model the growth processes of plant development. L-systems have also been used to model the morphology of a variety of organisms and can be used to generate self-similar fractals.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.12
• Poetry

On macOS I have to additionally install python-tk:

brew install python-tk

Installation

To install L-Sytems run:

poetry install

Run the Tests

To execute all the unit-tests run:

poetry run pytest tests

Build the Documentation

To build and view the project's documentation:

 poetry run mkdocs serve

Run the Examples

Example implementations of L-Systems can be found under the examples/ directory.

All examples have been taken from the book by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz, Aristid Lindenmayer – The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants.

poetry run python examples/bracketed_ol_system_fig1_24f.py

Licence

The content of this site is distributed under MIT NON-AI License.