Name: The Computational Beauty of Nature
ISBN: 9780262561273

The Computational Beauty of Nature

"In this book, Gary William Flake develops in depth the simple idea that recurrent rules can produce rich and complicated behaviors. Distinguishing "agents" (e.g., molecules, cells, animals, and species) from their interactions (e.g., chemical reactions, immune system responses, sexual reproduction, and evolution), Flake argues that it is the computational properties of interactions that account for much of what we think of as "beautiful" and "interesting." From this basic thesis, Flake explores what he considers to be today's four most interesting computational topics: fractals, chaos, complex systems, and adaptation."--BOOK JACKET.

What Hacker News says

anthkAug 2026

The Computational Beauty of Nature it's similar and it has the code of the book there:

https://github.com/gwf/CBofN

Some tools might crash X under CWM for OpenBSD, switch to FVWM or use some tool like mimalloc.

On Lisp, the book basically builds integers based on conses, kinda like Peano Axioms.

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LysPJApr 2026

If you consider the patterns in nature to be art (which I do!), you might enjoy the book "The Computational Beauty of Nature" by Gary William Flake. [0]

The subtitle is "Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation".

It's a wonderful book to own as a physical copy, and the contents are very inspiring for generative art.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Computational-Beauty-Nature-Explorati...

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anthkMar 2026

More like 1 = 0 + 1.

Read about Lisp, the Computational Beauty of Nature, 64k Lisp from https://t3x.org and how all numbers can be composed of counting nested lists all down.

List of a single item:

     (cons '1 nil)

Nil it's an empty atom, thus, this reads as:

[ 1 | nil ]

List of three items:

    (cons '1 (cons 2 (cons 3 nil)))

Which is the same as

    (list '1 '2 '3)

Internally, it's composed as is, imagine these are domino pieces chained. The right part of the first one points to the second one and so on.

[ 1 | --> [ 2 | -> [ 3 | nil ]

A function is a list, it applies the operation over the rest of the items:

     (plus '1 '2 3')

Returns '6

Which is like saying:

  (eval '(+ '1 '2 '3))

'(+ '1 '2 '3) it's just a list, not a function, with 4 items.

Eval will just apply the '+' operation to the rest of the list, recursively.

Whis is the the default for every list written in parentheses without the leading ' .

    (+ 1 (+ 2 3))

Will evaluate to 6, while

    (+ '1 '(+ '2 '3))

will give you an error as you are adding a number and a list and they are distinct items themselves.

How arithmetic is made from 'nothing':

https://t3x.org/lisp64k/numbers.html

Table of contents:

https://t3x.org/lisp64k/toc.html

Logic, too:

https://t3x.org/lisp64k/logic.html

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qubexDec 2025

Being somebody whose absolute favourite book is The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake (1998), this is the kind of stuff I come here for. So much more interesting than shop talk about the framework of the week, blockchain hype segueing into AI frenzy, and making fun of people who get stuck in VIM (I once got stuck in nano when for some reason the Control key became unmapped for unknown reasons eventually solved by spawning a new shell, killing the killalling the process, and resetting the terminal, so yeah — I might be an old hand but making fun of people is so not funny).

I’m glad the real hacker ethos of making stuff arbitrarily convoluted by mixing and matching various computational-equivalent substrates results is some truly bizarre results. An instant classic of the genre.

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anthkJul 2025

Hey Don, you would like "The Computational Beauty of Nature". In the end, Lisp/math axioms maybe define the world themselves recursively. We are running eval/apply forever...

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anthkAug 2024

Justne.lol would love "The Computational Beauty of Nature". It has a github repo, with references to Mandelbrot, more fractals, atractors, and, of course, a Lisp and building blocks.

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