# Reaction-Diffusion (Gray-Scott)

**Track:** Advanced Generative Art — Advanced Creative Coding — proposed (50)
**Framework / surface:** GLSL
**Level:** Hard
**Prerequisites:** 2D Cellular Automata / Game of Life, Images & Pixels as Arrays

**In one line:** Feed/kill pattern formation — Turing patterns.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

Two virtual chemicals, one feeding and one killing, diffuse at different rates across a grid and settle into spots, stripes, and labyrinths that never quite repeat. The Gray-Scott model—popularized for artists by John Pearson's 1993 Science paper "Complex Patterns in a Simple System"—is the workhorse, but the idea descends from Alan Turing's 1952 "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," which proposed diffusion-driven instability as nature's pattern engine. Karl Sims's interactive demonstrations made the dynamics legible to a generation of coders. The aesthetic is unmistakably biological: leopard rosettes, coral, fingerprints—emergent texture that feels found rather than designed. Simple local chemistry, global form.