Turing Pattern Grow

Turing Pattern Grow is a reaction-diffusion simulation game built on a 1952 paper by Alan Turing — not the Turing machine paper, not the Enigma work, but the most important paper of his life that almost nobody has read: The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis. Turing's question was simple and deep: how does a single fertilised cell, genetically identical to every cell it produces, develop into an organism with spots in the right places, stripes in the right direction, and the correct number of fingers? His answer: two chemicals, diffusing through developing tissue at different speeds, spontaneously break the uniformity of the initial state and produce stable spatial patterns. The faster-diffusing chemical suppresses the slower one at long range. The slower one promotes itself at short range. The tension between local activation and long-range inhibition, and nothing else, is sufficient to…