L systems are a formal grammar (whatever one of those is) invented by Lindenmayer to study the structure of plant growth. Loosely speaking an L system is specified by a re-writing rule, which gives a string of letters to replace a given letter by. Starting with a single letter F (meaning one step forwards) and replacing it by the string gives a new longer string of letters, which encodes the shape of Plant 1 (1st generation). Feeding this string back and doing the replacement on that gives a more complicated longer string, encoding the information for Plant 2.
Repeating this procedure can give a realistic looking fractal plant structure, although my flash program cannot cope with more than 3 iterations except for simple replacement strings.
Information about what the letters stand for still needs to be done.
Enter your replacement string in the box provided, choose the number of iterations and the angle of bend of the branches.
Then click ‘draw’and rotate the plant with the mouse.
Drag different sized gears/cogs onto the board, connect a motor and choose the speed. How do the speeds of the cogs (in rpm) depend on the number of teeth they have?