For another submission to Viz as Art contest at Tableau, I wanted to create something involving randomness and random walk specifically. But I found that the classic random walk algorithm creates results that are, well…too random, as opposed to the organic, botanical shapes I was looking for. Luckily, someone has already thought of developing a “Random Walk with Transition Probabilities that Depend on Direction of Motion”. It sounds nerdy, but that is just the recipe that Mother Nature uses to build branches on a blueberry bush, dandelion’s see head or the maple tree outside my window.  In particular, a particle always moves forward and changes direction or stays the course dependent on a given probability. One of the chapters in Clifford Pickover’s book “Computers, Pattern, Chaos and Beauty” describes this in more detail.

As with Lorenz Attractor visualization, I wrote a program in Processing to generate the points and export them to a text file. Below is a complete listing of the code:

[code language=”java”]
PrintWriter textFile;
//number of branches
int branchNum = 200;
//scale factor for angle theta
float delTheta = .9;
//scale factor for radius
float delRadius = 0.05;
//probability of transmission
float pt = 0.2;
//number of steps
int stepNum = 150;
//direction angle
float Theta = 0;

void setup(){
size(1000,1000);
background(0);

//initialize output text file
//textFile = createWriter(“txtfiles/points.txt”);

for (int branch = 0; branch < branchNum; branch++) {
//set initial conditions for each branch
float x0 = width/2;
float y0 = height/2;
float radius = 1;

float res = 0;
float dir = 1;
float lastDir = 1;
float thresh = 0;
strokeWeight(0);
stroke(0);
fill(random(1,255), random(1,255), random(1,255));
//stroke(random(1,255), random(1,255), random(1,255));

for (int step = 0; step < stepNum; step++) {
if (step == 0) {
res = random(0,1);
if (res > 0.5) {
dir=1;
} else {
dir=-1;
}
res = res * dir;
Theta = Theta + (res * delTheta);
radius = radius + delRadius;
float x = radius * cos(Theta) + x0;
float y = radius * sin(Theta) + y0;
line(x0, y0, x, y);
x0 = x;
y0 = y;
lastDir = dir;
} else {
if(lastDir == -1) {
thresh = pt;
} else {
thresh = 1 – pt;
}

res = random(0,1);
if (res > thresh) {
dir = 1;
} else {
dir = -1;
}
res = res * dir;
Theta = Theta + (res * delTheta);
radius = radius + delRadius;
float x = radius * cos(Theta) + x0;
float y = radius * sin(Theta) + y0;
line(x0, y0, x, y);
ellipse(x,y,10,10);
x0 = x;
y0 = y;
lastDir = dir;

//save output to text file
//textFile.println(branch + “,” + x + “,” + y);
//textFile.flush();
//exit();
}
}
}
}
[/code]

Just by changing one or two parameters, one can create an infinite number of patterns, some more organic looking than others. Here are sample outputs from Processing:

I imported the points into Tableau and played with different shapes, sizes an colours to achieve the best look. In the end, I settled for a basic grey circle with white outline. At first the monochrome chart was an uninteresting jumble of random points but after I added Branch field (unique branch number) to the Level of Detail, all tendrils got nicely separated revealing their organic structure.