The funny thing is that a 1000 particles chasing each other from random starting positions seem to manage this quite nicely. Initial jagged chaos swiftly evolves into flowing curves, continuously trying to simplify themselves. Guess I’m not a sufficiently complex, self-interacting system.

Anyway I’m rather pleased with this construct. Pointless overkill makes me happy. The construct and its code can be found here. There’s no interaction beyond resetting with a click of the mouse.

Update: Lucas Tamarit pointed out, somewhat uh… pointedly, that this piece is very similar to ‘sandtraveller’ by Jared Tarbell. Check this and the rest of his work out here. I’ve got to agree there’s definitely a resemblance. However, I’ve checked out the code and the mechanics behind ‘cyclic’ are really different from ‘sandtraveller’, as is the rendering technique. I invite everybody else to make the comparison.

Not every painting of a sunflower is a Van Gogh forgery.