Simulating the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction was my first foray into tinkering with morphogenesis back in January 2011. Inspired by Jim Al-Khalili's Secret Life of Chaos, I found this paper by Alasdair Turner and never looked back.
After my recent experiments with cubic coupling different reaction diffusion models, I thought I'd return to my roots and see what happens when I do the same to a Belousov–Zhabotinsky simulation. This reaction is best known for its spiral wavefronts, so I was expecting spirals within spirals - and that's pretty much what I got.
That was until I stumbled across something quite unexpected: vermiform solitons popping in and out of existence. The demo harness web-application has a few presets marked as 'vermiform solitons', they also show mitosis and recombination and orbiting solitons. These simulations evolve quite slowly, so here are a few with some After Effects magic to not only speed them up, but jazz them up too:
The application lives here and the Flex/ActionScript source code is available here.
This code has been ported to Ready by Tim Hutton and is now available as an experimental pattern.