[sarbaz]

The Hyphae image (and the trees) have a result that's very similar to Diffusion Limited Aggregation, but the method of generation is very different.

IMO the Hyphae way is actually less cool than plain DLA. The algorithm had a lot of degrees of freedom that were selected randomly, while DLA has very few degrees of freedom and gives a cooler shape

I guess the point is that sometimes a simpler algorithm can give more interesting results for this kind of thing

[kragen]

DLA is super awesome, but if you're starting from a point, it takes a lot of computation. Or, rather, what we thought of as a lot of computation around 1990. Hoff's version of "Hyphae" is orders of magnitude less computationally demanding.

In a lot of cases, if you're willing to throw a massive amount of computation at a morphogenetic problem, you can get a higher coolness-to-algorithmic-complexity ratio.