Algorithmic worlds

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2009-10-30 Spectra

2009-10-22 Machine drawings

2009-10-21 Fractal monochrome painting

2009-10-18 Spanish wetlands

2009-10-14 Another gigapixel image

2009-10-13 Running the numbers

2009-10-12 DLA by Andy Lomas

2009-10-11 Gigapixel image

2009-10-10 Stars from squares

2009-10-07 Fractal photography

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A blog about algorithmic art and fractal aesthetic. Subscribe to the RSS feed.

October 10th 2009

Stars from squares

Here is a great example of how surprising shapes can arise from the piling of a dull pattern. The pattern is pictured here:

This is simply a regular tiling by squares such that one tile out of four has been colored differently. Note that around each vertice of the square lattice, there are three squares of one color, and one of the other color, what makes this coloring uniform. Let's pile this pattern with a magnification step of 3. Here is what we get:

Consider the red squares in the basic pattern as tiles and the yellowish region as "empty". Now start piling the pattern. Each time a square tile of the copy of the pattern being added touches an existing tile (ie. their closure intersect), incorporate it to the tile. It is easy to see that up to rescaling, we get only one type of tile. The latter has a fractal boundary and tiles the plane (with arbitrarily small tiles...).

I do not remember having seen this fractal before. Its star shape might be vaguely reminiscent of the Koch snowflake, but it is definitely not one. (In an older blog post, I showed how the piling of hexagons arranged roughly in the same way did produce true Koch snowflakes.)

Here is a zoomable image based on this fractal.