Turles 2 - The Secret of the Ooze (1960s-1980s)
In the 60s, a trio of programmers and educators were trying to build an easy to learn programming language.
They were: Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert, and Cynthia Solomon.
They created a language called Logo, and built a newer, smaller Turtle Bot.
Then they attached a pen.
And so Turtles learned to draw!
This was a pretty handy time to be making a programming language, especially one that helped you imagine points in space.
Why?
Well, an imaginary turtle doesn't have to draw. It can just calculate.
Fundamentally, a Turtle is just a point in space.
And, around the 1960s, people were thinking a lot about points in space.
An abstract turtle, moving in three dimensions, can calculate the path to the moon!
And so the second generation of turtles took us to space. A lot of mission modelling was done with Turtle, and a highly optimized turtle called the Apollo Guidance Computer imagined landing on the moon before the astronauts touched down.
Programming Turtles became a great way to model the universe!
They allow us to imagine an infinite number of points in space, and see how little changes repeated hundreds or thousands of times change a system.
This newfound capability to draw any number of vectors helped visualize equations and explore fractal patterns in nature.
Even if you had to program in punchcards, programming Turtles in Logo was worth it.
One of the people who got interested in Turtles was a biologist named Aristid Lindenmayer
They wanted to model the behavior of cells of plants, to understand the simple rules that drove the primordial ooze within a plant to grow.
They came up with the concept of an L-Systems.
An L-System is described with an axiom, a set of rules, a number of iterations, and a way those rules are interpreted.
Lindermayer used them to model cell growth, then plant growth, and the field of computational biology grew from that seed.
Of course, it's not the only plant that took root.