Alan Turing’s Patterns in Nature, and Beyond | Wired Science | Wired.com
…At the heart of any Turing pattern is a so-called reaction-diffusion system. It consists of an “activator,” a chemical that can make more of itself; an “inhibitor,” that slows production of the activator; and a mechanism for diffusing the chemicals.
Many combinations of chemicals can fit this system: What matters isn’t their individual identity, but how they interact, with concentrations oscillating between high and low and spreading across an area. These simple units then suffice to produce very complex patterns.
“In principle, the behavior is generic. The trick is that you have to have the right rates for the chemical reactions, the right diffusion rates of reacting species,” said Irving Epstein, a Brandeis University chemist who studies pattern formation…
Images: Left: Alan Turing. (Ohio State University) Right: Patterns generated by a computer simulation of the Turing model. each is made by the same basic equation, with its parameters slightly tweaked. (Shigeru Kondo & Takashi Miura/Science)
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