Growth in Blind Watchmaker

So far in the Design Gene series we have covered what design genes are, the principles of design genes and how Biohaviour have structured their own design genes (see Part 1 & Part 2).

Now in Part 3 we will investigate how these design genes are implemented to grow a viable structure.

Growth Process

In this study of growing design genes Biohaviour has developed an algorithm to capture the growth process. The growth process of a design (growth algorithm) is an iterative loop incremented at each growth step (the number of growth steps is based on the working start and stop condition).

To guarantee growth occurs during the growth process the growth algorithm scans and checks each element in each gene in each growth step. The video below provides a demonstration of how the gene is read within the growth algorithm for one growth step, the output being a small cylindrical cell model.

The system will iterate through the growth algorithm and genes until the working stop condition is false for the genes and thus causing growth to stop.

Next in Design Genes

These simple rules, principles and algorithms allows for preliminary investigations of the concept. In the next design series, Part 4, we will take a deeper look into how a phenotype emerges from a genotype.